Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa
by featherwinglove
Summary: Queen Lucy and King Romu rule the world 708 years before the movie's events. Learn about the ancient split between Sheeta an Muska's ancestors, the truth about "Sodom and Gomorrah," and why they needed to say only "barasu" to end it all.
1. Chapter 1

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

WARNING: This fanfiction of _Laputa: Castle In The Sky_ is based on the original Studio Ghibli performance in Japanese. The English dub produced by Disney (i.e. starring Anna Paquin and James Van Der Beek) is not a translation and is materially different from the original. Further notes follow the chapter.

Chapter 1

Recommend opening theme: _The Afterwinter Remix_ by Sweafy

.com/watch?v=VhOin-to4Bc

708 years before the events in the Hayao Miyazaki movie produced by Studio Ghibli: _Laputa: The Castle In The Sky._

"Lucy," he says from close behind her, "What's the matter, my love?"

The queen's elaborate pink gown hides all of her legs but her tiny feet as she looks out of the tower's window into the castle's courtyard. Beyond it is the vast industrial centre of Jenwa, and even further away, up north behind her, the farming community of Gondoa.

The king gently puts his hands on her shoulders, and his proud, if small, crown gently tinks against her braided tiara, "Please, tell me."

She turns to look him in the eye and says frankly, in her gentle soprano voice, "I don't think it's right to go to war against Vendoa." Her eyes shift nervously to his elbow, "My diplomats tell me that their people are _not_ being oppressed, that their sinful life is really their choice. Who are we to judge them for that?"

It's not like the royal castle is in much danger from Vendoa to the south. Even if an attacker could get past the fiercely loyal population of Jenwa (which of course, the queen would order evacuated if it ever came to that), they face several thousand armed robotic wardens. The seven metre tall gardeners might _look_ harmless, but inside their steel exteriors hides a distributed network of kuuseki-stabilized cold fusion reactors, and their faces belie the presence of several powerful lasers. Four versatile segmented limbs with interchangeable links and appendages make them very easy to maintain, and almost impossible to immobilize.

Lucy, the gentle queen, turns back to the window, not fully aware of how much the king loves to touch the dark braided ponytails that just brushed through his fingers. She sees one of the great wardens feeding a hungry, and rather large flock of doves and pigeons. Gently etched grooves in the robot's shoulders hint at how many decades it has been doing this every morning, without a care to the corrosive properties of the birds' guano. She smiles at the scene, as she does almost every morning.

"Lucy," the king says softly, "You know their terrible habits and how they spread disease through their people. What sort of perverse heart does it come from, that they would do such things to their children? How must the mothers feel that their sons marry other men and their daughters are left without children?"

"It's worse than that, I know," Lucy weeps, "There are grandmothers in Vendoa, because their daughters find men who give them children ... most of them regret having them, or don't even want them in the first place. These children live as orphans in blocks with long corridors, bunked three high, twelve to a room, even though both parents live ... such loose and distant lives that their sons and daughters forget their names." She turns to look at him again; her tears are real, "It is _there_ that we must go, with our teachers and textbooks, to show these parentless kids that there is still _love_ in this world. Better ways to live." She reaches up around the king's shoulders and rests her head on one of her elbows, kissing his ear before whispering into it, "The Laputan way to live is better than the Vendoan way they are taught by example. We need to be a new example, Romu, not destroy them."

Romu, the king of Laputa, gently holds his wife and queen, "We are already close to war, my love. Vendoa has closed their borders to our merchants and diplomats."

"But they still come to Jenwa to trade," she says softly, "They still see how we live, and my diplomats find ways in. There are even two consulate offices in Kutsui that local officials haven't forced the closures of. Even as they sin, the administrators of these housing blocks for the children would like to see the cycle end."

Romu withdraws from the gentle embrace and looks into her eyes, "But their prime minister, the one who forced the king to abdicate most everything but his throne, doesn't want to give up his power, my love. He would rather burn Vendoa to the ground than lose his ersatz throne."

"It's hard to tell," she admits, "I haven't seen him in person in four years. But even in that case, let _him_ burn down Vendoa," she shakes her head gently, "We should not do it for him."

"What if they become the example for _our_ people?" Romu asks, "What if Jenwa starts living like that?"

"Anyone who does would no longer be a part of Laputa," Lucy says softly, "That's how it has always been. Some have moved away, it's so sad." She bows her heads, "But we could let their children..."

"_No!_" he barks, tightening his grip on her shoulders. As she looks up, he says, "We can't let those horrible diseases spread to _our_ people, my love."

"How do we know those diseases spread through anything other than the flawed Vendoan way of life?" she asks gently, "They live as we do not allow; we would send them back if they did."

"Better to keep them away, so they don't try in the first place!" he growls, then departs, slamming the door.

The queen cries for a minute before taking the signet stone that hangs around her neck and looking at it. The emblem of Laputa glows softly back. She turns it upright, and then asks, "Has he even noticed that the tree is grieved?"

She starts her day about a quarter of an hour late, handling an ever lengthening docket of complaints from the Jenwans about the lack of work and stifled business with the Vendoans. She feels the gauge of her people. Many itch for war against their disgusting neighbours to the south. Some wish that Laputa would simply allow them freely in without any restrictions on their behaviour. Her court sees the wild arguments that often erupt between Laputans who hate Vendoans, and Laputans who hate merely what the Vendoans do at night. For the first time in a week, she settled an easy dispute between Gondoan shepherds arguing over the ownership of seven sheep found in the woods. She decided to remand the sheep in the royal garden, where she'll care for them personally for one week so that the litigants can prepare their cases. Their only complaint about her was that Gondoa doesn't see enough of her any more because of the dispute with Vendoa.

The sheep like her very much, but they are terrified of the robotic wardens, who are unfamiliar in Gondoan pastures (or any pastures outside the castle, for that matter.) The wardens are confused, but accepting. The restless sheep are comforted by the Gondoan song Lucy sings for them:

_Put down your roots in the soil._

_Let us live together with the wind._

_Pass the winter with the seeds._

_Sing in the spring with the birds._

She takes their leave and wanders into the courtyard, now fussed about by a servant who's noticed that her royal gown isn't up to standard after the visit with the sheep. She assures the servant that she will change in a few minutes, and sends her away from the inner court.

Momentarily, she gazes up at the sky. She reflects for a moment how amazing it might seem to someone who hasn't grown up in the castle, that the walls of the garden let the light inside as though they were windows, but from the outside, appear as ordinary stone. Then she collapses in grief at the base of the great tree, on her hands and knees, braided pony tails dragging the tips of her long hair through the moss. She cries, "Why did we ever eat your fruit? Knowing good from evil instead of the guiding voice of God has ruined us utterly. Can we ever be free?"

The tree has nothing to say, apparently comfortable in the orange light of the setting sun far to the west, and oblivious to the queen crying on one of its huge roots.

[From the movie: Muska: "Their dreaded empire once ruled the earth! ... Lucita Toelle Uru Laputa. Uru means _ruler_ in Laputan, Toelle means _true:_ Queen Lucita: rightful heir to the Laputan throne." - 42-43min. "I, too have an ancient, secret name, Lucita: Romuska Palo Uru Laputa. We are descended from the same royal family that split in two down on earth." - 1:43. "Watch your words. You're in the presence of Laputa's king." - 1:45. The lyrics of the song were lifted from Sheeta's words at 1:53 (the tune is unknown), and are apparently unrelated to the closing theme, which I have not yet translated. The full names of these characters are the same as their movie-era decendants, but I have used different parts for their short names: "Lucy" instead of "Sheeta" and "Romu" instead of "Muska". Perhaps Cory (my best guess for his name) is wearing Romu's crown at 2:00 right at the end of the movie.]

Notes for the whole story:

If you are familiar with the English edition, but not the original Japanese, or an accurate translation thereof, this fanfiction will be full of holes and conflicts. One you can safely ignore occurs at 1:53, where Sheeta says "You cannot live apart from the earth", in the English dub, she says, "You cannot live without love." Also, the "From the movie" sections at the end of most chapters will often clarify things, so you should be able to get by on the English dub (please remember that the English dub is a different _version,_ and I was not following it.) Finally, it is not essential for you to have seen _Castle In The Sky_ to be able to understand _Shattered Elegance._ After looking into the English dub, I decided to call the special material after its original Japanese name, _kuuseki_, insead of either English name _volucite_ or _etherium._

How to know if your _Castle In The Sky_ subtitles are accurate: The first words from the airship crewman are "Pirates!" or "It's pirates!", "They're pirates", and the one speaking into the voice tube is saying "It's a raid" ("Mayday", which was originally French "Merde", is the same in all languages as an international distress signal, listen for it on the Japanese audio, lol!) Muska tells Sheeta to "get down on the floor"; after Sheeta bonks Muska, one of his bodyguards outside says, "It's tear gas!" When Louis almost falls out the window of Muska's cabin, he says "Mama, I'm falling." Dola's exact instructions were "Quick, go next door." If your subtitles are _really_ good, the next one will be "I want that kuuseki/volucite/etherium" instead of "I want that stone/crystal". She also mentions the material name once again before the title sequence begins.

Notes for parents: I have made some highly oblique references to some _very_ adult themes, however children educated today may get them on their own as young as twelve. In this story, it will be apparent that Vendoan children have difficulties they should never face, especially at the ages they do. Real-life children facing such circumstances may respond adversely to certain parts, and this is also a trigger warning for adults with similar histories. This story presents these problems with an emphasis on love over morality. They are also presented in such a way that younger readers will not understand or be able to look them up online using text from the story (I tried just now. I made up an STI for this story that is based on, but both harder to transmit and deadlier than HIV.) Some themes echo _UnChristian_ by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons (2007 Grand Rapids, Michigan: BakerBooks; also affilliated with Project Fermi and the Barna Group), a book I did not encounter until six months after finishing _Shattered Elegance_ in 2010 November.

Rating note: Rating based on education on applicable "mature themes" at age levels as recommended by SIECUS starting in 1991. If I went by more traditional standards, I would rate it one level higher, but I did try to make it safe for traditionally educated teens where these themes are introduced later in one's curriculum. Having said that, I foresee the possibility that some parents of publicly educated US and Canadian children may wish to expose their children to the more traditional "Laputan" (hetero-monogamous) perspective on these themes before they hit the much more liberal (and dangerous) views presented by public education starting in the fourth grade. I'll follow advice given in reviews as to ratings.


	2. Chapter 2

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 2A 101101

The boy crawls out of bed in his pyjamas.

"Onayi," his bunkmate calls from below, "I thought you were going to miss breakfast."

"Impossible with your racket, Yukai," Onayi groans as he descends the ladder, "The way you wake up and smack my bunk with your head every morning, I wonder whether it'll outlast that stubborn head of yours."

Yukai does it again as he pulls upright. He's obviously used to it, "There's only fifty centimetres between my pillow and your bunk."

"It's not a pillow, it's your knapsack," Onayi grumbles as he arrives at the floor. Chubby, or rather, Chobasi, has already vacated his bottom bunk, which is really the floor with an extra layer of tatami on it.

"He's gone already," Yukai says, "he _loves_ breakfast you know."

"I can't see how," Onayi grumbles, "They can't even cook oatmeal properly. I can't wait until the Laputans open a community kitchen here."

That damps Yukai's morning fire as his stocking feet dangle over the edge of his bed, a few inches from the floor. He's about a year younger than Onayi's twelve.

"Also," Onayi says with a wink, "He probably doesn't like the prospect of your smelly feet dangling in front of his face first thing."

"I wash them the night before," Yukai pouts.

"Why so glum?" Onayi asks.

"Like _you_ should ask," Yukai grumbles.

"Something about the Laputan kitchen?" Onayi presses.

"I was just about to get adopted by a family in Jenwa, Onayi," he says, almost excited, but then returns to his pouty pose, "But now, the guards won't let me into Jenwa ... Now there's talk of war."

"The Laputans are offended by our customs," Onayi explains, "_Some_ of them anyway."

"Such as?" Yukai asks.

"Men marrying other men," Onayi shudders at the repulsive thought, but he's trying to get more comfortable saying it, at least until he can find a way to escape Vendoa, "and how many wives king Kaideno has. I wonder, the prime mini-"

"Well," Yukai gets a little self-righteous, "How many wives does King _Romusika_ have?"

"Just the one," Onayi says, "Just Queen Lucy."

"That's Queen _Lucita_ to you, Vendoan," Yukai points.

"You _know_ she prefers Lucy, if you've ever listened to Laputans talk," Onayi snorts as he changes shirts.

"How do you know?" Yukai snarls, "You never met her."

Onayi is obviously right on that point, but he starts to develop a doubt as he advances through the shelter's assembly line shower. It is polite for the boys to ignore each other while wetting, soaping, and rinsing in the busy communal washroom, and that gives Onayi time to think about the beautiful lady he met the previous summer when he snuck into Jenwa.

She had worn a shockingly girly pink gown, like the sort Vendoan girls grow out of when they turn six. She looked taller, but somehow younger than his faintly remembered teenaged mother. After she glanced at him, the man she was talking with gave her a polite bow and walked away. It looked like he was a miner or a lumberjack. The lady stooped to his eye level and said, "Hi, I'm Lucy."

"Onayi," he squeaked humbly. He was obviously in Jenwa illegally.

"Hmm," she pondered for a moment, "Sounds like you could be from Vendoa. Sorry, that was rude. Well, wherever you're from, I hope you enjoy your visit to Laputa."

She gave him a delicious sandwich, and he remembered this tiny blue stone that hung from her neck ... that seemed to glower at him like a protective pet. He didn't get a good look at its emblem.

While remembering, and missing, that splendid sandwich, Yukai's voice intrudes into his mind, "Wow, this must be a great breakfast."

Onayi suddenly focuses on the unpalatable slop on his spoon, drops it back in his bowl, pushes it across the narrow width of the twenty metre long mess hall table, and mutters, "Sure, you can have it."

"Thanks," Chobasi answers, pulling the bowl from in front of Yukai, whose opinion of breakfast actually isn't much higher than Onayi's. Onayi thought he was developing an odd shape, not really "Chubby" like the other kids called him, but his torso widened while his arms and legs shrank. Onayi couldn't figure out why, just that he was a fiercely loyal Vendoan.

"Onayi," Yukai says, "You seem a little out of it this morning."

"I think that maybe," Onayi says tentatively, "maybe I _have_ met her."

"Met who?" Yukai asks earnestly.

Onayi does his best to develop an impish grin to hide his true meaning as he says, "That _one_ wife we were talking about earlier."

Yukai gasps.

"_Hey,_ I don't want _everyone_ knowing who I'm talking about," Onayi says playfully.

The girls on the other side of the mess hall start whispering and giggling. Among the girls, Onayi's something of a pariah (not as bad as Chobasi, but still.) In any case, his secret is quite safe.

Onayi and Yukai have been taking advantage of Kutsui Children's Home's shortstaffed status and sneaking off to the Laputan consulates in the area, where they, on occasion, get some real food. He can tell the diplomats and their staff are quite distressed at the thought that their leftovers are so much better than Kutsui's main course that children risk punishment by sneaking to merciful outsiders.

"Change your plans for today," the man says directly to Onayi as he walks by.

"Damn," Yukai snorts, "Probably a rockslide or a mine collapse ... is it flooding season yet?"

"I wish Vendoa could afford proper emergency workers," Chobasi grumbles between spoonfuls.

"Or we had fewer emergencies," Onayi, senior, and strongest, of the three, says mournfully, "The gods don't seem to like Vendoa."

The man who walked by was the shelter's director. His usual fare was that the shelter's parentless children were drafted to clean up some mess. All the shelters worked on a rotation, so they say, but the disaster victims are generally grateful for their help. Onayi likes it better than the usual night life of Vendoa. He's been warned over and over again not to leave the shelter after dark, often enough that he suspects his Laputan eating habits are unofficially more widely known. They say, "There are men out there who like children in all the _wrong_ ways."

Chobasi was one of them, and he _never_ talks about it. Looking at his shape, and how he's losing strength despite how much he eats, Onayi wonders if he's caught one of those nasty diseases the Laputans keep warning Vendoa's citizens about. He more strongly suspects the food, since Chobasi never goes on his Laputan forays.

Plainly, Yukai has snuck into Jenwa before, but he and Onayi have never done so together. It is safe there at night, so it is _feasible_ (that's a new word Onayi just looked up two days before from a smuggled Laputan dictionary) to go out just after supper, on the three hour journey to the border, get there just after the sun sets, spend the night, and get back in time for roll call at lunch. Onayi has pulled it off three times, but got busted on the second time (that was a week in the stone box, a price he is willing to pay every now and then for a decent meal and a couple of good books ... It's a good think they never found out _why_ he was missing.)

The director waits until the mess hall is quite a bit quieter than he usually does when he starts speaking. This scares the kids, as it is very unusual.

"The Laputan ambassador..." he begins slowly.

Ambassador is something like consul, only bigger, Onayi remembers.

"...has informed the Vendoan government that Laputa demands the unconditional surrender of Vendoa's land, assets, and people," the director seems quite stricken as he continues, "If the surrender does not happen, a state of war will exist between Laputa and Vendoa..."

The children are shuffling nervously. Youngers pester elders to know why they are so scared. The director isn't really waiting for them to quiet down again, Onayi notices; it is still quite a bit quieter than it usually is when he starts speaking during a typical "state emergency". No, the director is startled out of his wits at this news.

"All classes are cancelled. Gather your belongings, children, only what you can carry," he says, hands clenched into trembling fists.

That scares the little ones, and many start crying.

"We march for Tekiton after lunch," the director continues, "The government believes it is too dangerous for us to remain here, so close to the border with Laputa. Children," he sheds a tear, "Youngers," which refers to those under six, who are _never_ required to march to emergencies, "your assigned elders will explain what I've said to you as best they can."

"_Tekiton,_" Chobasi groans, "That's so far away. How can we get there before dark if we start off after lunch?"

"They'll have a camp for us," Onayi says quietly, realizing why the director told _him_ to change his plans. Perhaps the director quietly ... very quietly indeed ... believes that the Laputan way of life is better. Perhaps not, so play this dangerous game as safely as you can.

He waits until the other circles of friends have started off into their own bewildered conversations before announcing his decision in a harsh whisper: "Jenwa is closer than Tekiton. Volunteers _only._ At the secret gate in _one _hour. We'll be there _by_ lunch."

[From the movie: The pirates names are contemporary English names, ("Louis", 18min and "Charles", 59min; "Ben" in English letters, is visible on a drinking pot at 1:07, and may be the name of Dola's husband) sounded out in Japanese. The names in this story usually are cool sounding katakana syllables, and I haven't explored any potential meanings of any of them, except for Chobasi's similarity to the English word "Chubby", of course. I did knock out the vowels that would probably be squished out of the Japanese pronunciation anyway ("Muska" instead of "Musika" to quote an example from the movie.) Of the place names, only "Laputa" and "Gondoa" are mentioned in the movie. Pazuu's town is not named in the movie, but based on the scenery in 1:05 to 1:06, I have big plans for it; since starting this story, it has been very difficult for me to watch that part of the movie without crying. The food: The author has quite a bit of experience with mess hall food, including undercooked chicken, cereal that has sat in milk for twenty minutes before being served, and oatmeal so badly done as to induce vomiting. Fortunately, I've also had _good_ mess hall food, sometimes _really_ good mess hall food (CFB Edmonton, and Camp Chestermere, which is a private business; I won't tell you the bad ones since I don't want to fight a lawsuit if they read this story.)]


	3. Chapter 3

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 3

"I wish you hadn't have done that," Lucy sighs as she senses the approach of Romu behind her. The warden feeding the pigeons and doves is completely oblivious to the changed mood of the castle. The birds, however, sense the tension in the air, and seem anxious to finish their seeds and crumbs and return to their safe perches with full stomachs.

"It gives them a week ... This can still end peacefully," he assures her.

"Not if they _don't_ surrender," Lucy cries as she spins around, "And under the circumstances they are _well_ within their rights to _attack_ Jenwa before the deadline." The bawling queen turns back to the window ledge and leans on it. The warden looks somber, but Lucy reminds herself that the robots _always_ look somber; it's a side-effect of their design. "You might have seen the courier rush past you in the corridor. I've ordered the evacuation of Jenwa."

"You are _so_ predictable," Romu groans.

"So are Jenwans," she sobs, "They would be quite concerned if I _didn't_ order their evacuation."

"We are in no danger, love," Romu says as he looks out the window with her, "Our technology is much better, our soldiers better trained and led. They don't stand a chance."

"That isn't _all_ there is to international relations!" she bawls, "Don't you _care_ about the people?"

"I leave that up to you, love," he says.

"Romu, I-" she turns to him, eyes full of tears, "I can't believe you don't realize what wars and surrenders _do_ to people. All those Vendoan children I want to help ... want to save..." She collapses on the window ledge, "They must be terrified out of their minds ... must think I hate them."

Romu decides to change topics, "Lucy," he says softly, "Why do you stare out this window every morning? I've been here a few times, and I don't see anything interesting enough to demand half an hour of your day each morning."

"The gardener feeds the birds," she sobs, "Little Snowy, Twinkles, Zebra, and Sandy, over there," she points. "They get tamer all the time ... well, until this morning anyway."

"They're just birds," Romu snorts.

Lucy can't say any more. How did they drift apart? How could her husband declare war on another country without even telling his queen? But his touch is still as gentle, isn't it? His hand on her shoulder just as warm, right?

As Romu turns to depart, he says, "Lucy, my love ... I'm sure you'll understand when it is over ... probably by the end of this month, they'll be _your_ people, too. _Then _you can help them."

"Lucky, Orotsu, Yukai, Kinibrai, Hanasi, Onayi ... and all you whose names I never learned or can't remember," she sobs, "I'm so sorry ... so sorry."

Romu seems rather perplexed at his wife with her face between her elbows on the windowsill, crying, "Gomenne ... gomennasai" What does _that_ mean?

"Sir," the officer says as he catches up to him in the corridor, "King Romu, the gates with Vendoa are closed, but er..."

"But?" he asks.

"The queen's unofficial diplomats," he says, "Not all of them have returned. We have plans to extract them under cover of nightfall. They are backup plans we haven't told you or the queen about, just in case something like this happened."

"Hmm," Romu says, "I guess I'm predictable, too. I'll have to do something about that."

"Well," the officer nods, "You _did_ tell us to be ready for all sorts of possibilities, especially on our border with Vendoa. We decided it would be best to prepare for the most obvious ones, especially that of a sneak attack by the Vendoans to try to trump our military strength by catching us off-guard."

"Good thinking," Romu says, "Carry on. Tell me when you have all of our diplomats, both official and unofficial, safely behind our lines."

"Sir," he crisply salutes and carries on.

A minute later, he's in front of the queen, her two aides face a difficult make-up job. "Your majesty, forgive me for saying," he starts, "but it seems you've been crying."

"I have, General" she admits.

"Ma'am," he says respectfully, "Your diplomats are in good hands with my special unit. And," he had trouble looking her in the eye as he corrects her mistake, "It's _Colonel._"

"Come here, please," she says, "I don't have time for formalities today."

As he approaches, he gives her aides a polite wave, pulls the leaves from his lapel and pins on the star she was holding, "It's _General,_ now, and your special unit includes the 31st and 32nd Pathfinder batallions."

The officer is shocked, and wonders why his "special unit" has just more than tripled in strength. He takes a step back and bows, then watches the queen's aides return to their duties making the queen look pretty again while he figures out how to ask.

"It's the children," she sighs, "Do what you can to preserve intact the Kutsui and Hinoan children shelters. Don't kill any of them, even if they fire on you. Vendoa does not trust their children with weapons strong enough to penetrate their riot armor, and ours is far superior."

"Yes, your majesty," he says, "But from what I know of Vendoans, it would not surprise me to find a proper crossbow in the hands of children if war ever broke out."

"And please don't bring it up with Romu," she says, "If he asks, don't withhold anything from him, but don't volunteer your objectives if he does _not_ ask."

"Yes, ma'am," he says.

"I'll be in Jenwa," she says, "staying nights at the royal villa, if necessary. I wish to be the last civilian to leave in the evacuation."

"You care too much, your majesty," the general says cautiously.

"I need to make up for someone who doesn't care enough," she sighs.

"Yes, ma'am," he says before departing.

"Arigato," she says, too late for him to hear.

"Ma'am?" one of the aides asks in concern.

"Oh," she says, "It was for him. But yes, thank you too."

As the queen closes her eyes to accept the eyeliner, the two aides glance at each other and shrug. Neither has any idea what "Arigato" meant.

[From the movie: The combat abilities of the robot in the terrestrial castle were demonstrated from 54min to 1:01 in the movie, and were very impressive despite major damage to its appendages before it woke up. Another is seen from 1:28 to 1:33 and briefly at 1:59, affirming that the design has an impressive ability to understand the emotions of humans and animals (the first one did as well. On the other hand, they demonstrate an ugly side from 1:47 to 1:50.) Just one of these things would pose a major problem, even to today's (2010) armies.]


	4. Chapter 4

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 4

"Wait up!" Chobasi pants as the others get ahead of him.

Onayi holds a small girl as he runs, while Chobasi is unladen, obviously way out of shape. "We need to get there as soon as possible ... Before noon, if we can."

Onayi leads about twenty of the children, carrying about seven youngers. He arrives at the gatehouse to Jenwa, "Sir," Onayi says, "We flee Kutsui. They will march all the kids who remain to Tekiton."

"The border's closed kids, got a code?" the guard asks tersely.

"No," Onayi bawls, "Please, just one night ... You can make us work ... Load carts or wash floors or something. We don't want to go to Tekiton, we'll get there in the night when the gangs are about."

That ignites a resolve in Chobasi, "Please, sir, he's right. We're in danger if we stay."

"Sorry, boys," he says, slamming the little window.

"And _girls!_" Satomi, who's nine years old, cries. The girls actually outnumber the boys, forming about two thirds of the group, including the youngers.

"Lucy," Onayi says, "This lady I met here one visit. She said we can come here if we're in trouble."

The little window opens again, "Lucy? Describe her."

"She wore this beautiful pink gown, a gold tiara on her head," Onayi describes, "And she had this blue stone around her neck. I didn't get a good look at it, but I saw ... I think ... the branches of a tree."

The window slams.

"Please, sir!" Satomi bawls, "Let us in!"

The gate cracks open. "Hurry up, this is not the time to be breaking rules and you _know_ it!" the guard urges.

"How the heck does _that_ work?" Yukai gasps as the kids rush through the gate.

"Stay right here," the guard orders, indicating an empty luggage inspection area. He goes just outside to the corridor. "Colonel?" he asks, "or, sorry, _General,_ congratulations on your promotion. I've got twenty-eight bawling Vendoan children here, claim they're from Kutsui ... one of them described the queen ... Oh?"

He comes back in. "Sir, can we stay the night, please?" Satomi pleads, "The things they do to girls at night in Tekiton..."

"Yes," the guard says, "I'll need a small sample of everyone's blood. We need to do some tests. The diseases that are spreading through Vendoa because of your lifestyle can't be introduced into Laputa, especially not on the eve of war."

Nobody objects, although it distresses most of the youngers; they endure it with an elder's help. They each sit still while one of the Laputan sketchers draws their faces to go with the samples. They gape at his speed and skill, as he's faster at drawing their faces than Kutsui's stenographers are at copying the director's speeches.

Beyond their view, the guard assigns each face and name a code to go with the swab. The lab isn't to know the identity that belongs to each sample. He enters with the package to a bored lab staff. "Here's some to run while you wait for the wagons. Just twenty-eight, and they _should_ all pass."

The guard comes to the kitchen. "Oh, crud," he mutters as he realizes that the kitchen staff has been evacuated. He pulls open a couple of cupboards and is relieved to find ingredients still there.

"Can any of you cook?" he asks as he returns.

"I, uh," Satomi starts.

"Well?" the guard prompts.

"...just started classes," she says sheepishly.

"Well," the guard explains, "The kitchen is dangerous, but there's no other way you're getting supper." He sighs, "Can I at least be sure you and anyone you pick to help out won't cut off your fingers or burn off your eyebrows?"

She nods, "Okay. I _do_ know that much." She turns to the rest of them and says, "Three should be enough to cook for us all, and you two," she points out Onayi and Yukai, "seem to know the most about Laputan food. Let's go."

The guard shows them the kitchen. "It's _big,_" the nine-year-old remarks. She gets a stool to help her reach the cupboards. She glances at the dizzying array of ingredients and gasps, "God, where do I start?"

"Check it out!" Onayi exclaims.

Satomi turns to see him gawking at a book.

"Wow, they get _really_ specific with these, er," Onayi holds a page while he closes the cover to glance at it, "_recipes,_" he says at last.

"Recipes!" Satomi jumps down from her stool and takes the book. "Wow!" she says, "These columns ... must be batch sizes."

"Thirty, that's us," Yukai points out.

"Let's pick something simple," Satomi says with a hopeful glint, "I've never cooked before, after all." She falls in love with a recipe for breaded chicken thighs, and somehow thinks that rice goes with it.

"Oh, _good,_" Onayi sighs, "It has instructions for how to tell when its properly done, something the Kutsui cooks don't seem to have mastered." He looks around, "To make sure, we uhm, use..." He finds the meat probe, "_this!_ It makes sure it's hot enough inside."

The three children prepare their chicken and rice meal and serve it up. They've made too much, so the guards can have some instead of their storable ration bread.

"It's not up to the kitchen's _usual_ standard," the guard who lets them in says.

"Yeah, I know," Yukai groans.

"_Sshh!_" Onayi elbows him.

The children are downright impressed, especially Chobasi, "No wonder you'd spend a week in the stone box!" he laughs.

A lab technician grabs the guard's elbow, "They're from Vendoa, aren't they?" he asks.

"How'd you guess?" the guard asks.

"All the leukocyte counts are a bit high," the technician sighs, "but one." He scans the room, "I think I know whose."

"Did it fail?" the guard asks.

"Yes," the technician says, "He's got JBP."

The guard sighs, "Aw, _thud!_"

"It looks like his system's been fighting it for over a year," the technician says, "And there's only one known way to catch that bug." He whispers that into the guard's ear.

"A forbidden practice in Laputa," the guard sighs, "so we have to send him back."

"Five days until the war begins," the technician groans, "assuming they don't attack us. And we get," he gestures at the group of children.

"Sir!" another guard says, "Come!"

As the second guard shows the first to the group in the gate's vestibule, he says, "And these guys had a code."

"I'm one of Queen Lucy's consuls," a young lady dressed in a Vendoan pantsuit explains, "These fifty-five kids stormed the consulate at noon, just before we left. They're from Kutsui shelter. They said they just started marching the entire population for Tekiton, the Vendoan capital, right at that hour. The capital is a kid's worst terror at night; I can't blame them."

"Should've cooked a bigger lunch," the guard groans.

"Yeah, _right,_" she sighs, "I know Lucy: she would have evac'd the kitchen staff the first hour and left you all eating ration breads until the army got here."

"There's a girl and two boys in the _first_ group," the guard profers his plate, "Pretty spiffy for a _nine_ year old."

"_What_ first group?" the consul asks, "We're following _very_ specific plans that say _we_ are the first group."

"H'Oh, boy," the second guard says.

"The general said he was okay with it," the first guard says, "And they didn't have any Laputans with them. I let them in because their leader ... an _Onaya_ or something like that, gave a very _accurate_ description of Queen Lucy."

"General?" the consul asks as she tugs along the few adults in the group towards the kitchen, "The extraction of the children is being run by _Colonel _Tali. _Top_ secret."

"_General_ Tali as of this morning, apparently," he clarifies, "He's got three battalions."

The consul gasps.

[From the movie: Pazuu and Sheeta both demonstrate some culinary prowess, at the age of about twelve, although the latter's, shown from 1:10 to 1:13, is much more impressive (i.e: she managed to clean up a disaster of a kitchen in just twenty-eight seconds!) than the former's (16min, although they don't get to eat it until 29min). From elsewhere: Satomi is named after DJ Satomi, who wrote the famous Hardcore/Techno single _Castle In The Sky_ (which actually has nothing to do with _Laputa_ as far as I can tell.) In researching DJ Satomi for other reasons, I learned that "Satomi" is a traditional Japanese given name for girls, and that, to my surprise, DJ Satomi is a man! Yuu Watase plays it the other way with fictional pop singer "Shuro" in the manga _Ayashi no Ceres,_ by the way (she only gets a cameo in the anime.)]


	5. Chapter 5

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 5

"General," Lucy respectfully greets, holding her crystal upon her chest as she bows, "I got your reports."

"Your Majesty," he returns the bow, "83 from Kutsui, but only twelve from Hinoan."

"That's 95 more than I expected at this phase," Lucy sighs, "Still, I hope the Tekitona sinners aren't in a partying mood this close to an unwinnable war. How many have special diseases?"

"You-" General Tali gasps, "were ... _expecting-?_"

"I come to Jenwa more often than you know" she says, "and they sneak into Jenwa on a sporadic basis ... very easy to spot, actually, since Jenwa has few broken families. If a child is reluctant to utter her mother's name, she is almost certainly Vendoan. How many?"

"Five," the General sighs, "We've separated them from the main group."

"Oh no!" she gasps, "Take me to them, right now!"

The five children are clustered together in a corner of the unfurnished storeroom, apparently inconsolable in their grief.

Lucy crouches, recognizes one of them and tugs at his shoulder until he looks at her, "Kinibrai!" she gasps.

"Lucy!" he cries, jumps on her and hangs on for dear life, "I missed you so much! Thank you for coming!"

After several minutes of letting him hang onto her, she gently pries the eleven year old boy from her embrace and softly asks, "How did you get JBP?"

"Oh," he winces, then squeaks, "Lucy ... I ... I-I thought you _cared_ about us."

Tears flow from her eyes, as she brushes unkempt strands of hair from his, "I do, but I know how you catch JBP," she shakes her head, "It is not a thing for people your age."

"Please!" Chobasi bawls, "I didn't want to do it. I snuck out at night, hoping to visit the Laputan ur ..."

"Consulate," she says for him.

"But there were four _big_ guys," Chobasi continues in tears, "who dragged me into an alley. They took turns. Three held me down while the one..."

"I know the rest," she wipes a tear from his eye, "after all ... there is only _one_ known way to catch JBP."

"Kinibrai," she turns to the one she's met before, "You didn't want to do it?" *

He cowers, unable to answer.

"Or ... you might have wanted to do it at first," Lucy says, "until you understood what it was. You'll never do it again, right?"

"No, ma'am," he squeaks, "_never_ ... I swear."

"Laputans don't swear," she says softly, "we just try our best to make sure that what we say is always the truth. _True_ Laputans, at any rate." She closes her eyes and pulls a tear from her own cheek, "and do our best to make amends when it isn't. You want to be like that, right?"

"Your Majesty?" General Tali softly asks.

The children collectively gasp.

"One more minute, please, General," she says quietly, but with a royal insistence.

"Okay," the General says, "But the other ninety are getting pretty excited." He backs out of the room.

"Do you ... always wear shoes?" she asks no one in particular.

They all nod, but Chobasi clarifies, "It's never warm enough to even sleep without socks, and the floor is dirty ... you take a few steps in your bare feet and you'll have peely-toes for a whole month!"

"Laputa isn't like Kutsui at all," she says quietly, "but this isn't a habit I'm asking you to change. We need to put a small orange tatoo on each of you to identify that you have JBP ... where it will only be seen by doctors and mates. I don't want to put it where General Tali suggested, but if no one normally sees your feet, I think that is a better place."

The children seem quite sad at this.

"It is a secret you're allowed to keep, and a secret that should be easy to keep," she explains softly, "especially since none of you deserve such an awful sickness."

"Are we going to die?" Chobasi asks soberly.

"Yes," Lucy says, "But we are _all_ going to die. You ... in your twenties ... thirties perhaps, if you live well." She sobs quietly, "You may never marry ... nor do with anyone those things that married people do ... You may never have children. I'm sorry to impose such rules on your lives, but the consequences for your mates and children with JBP in your family are so terrible as to undo the joy of having them. I can't make it up to you, but I'll try my best to." She brushes Kinibrai's cheek and looks into his eyes, "That's a promise for _all _of you."

"I can't ever have a husband or children?" the one girl in the group sobs.

"I'm so sorry," Lucy weeps, "but ... does that beat sending you back to Vendoa?"

Kinibrai jumps on her again, and she braces against the floor to keep from falling over, "Thank you, ma'am ... Your Majesty," he weeps.

She reintroduces the five later to the main group. They have slight limps from their new tatoos.

"Chobasi," Onayi sighs as he embraces him, "I thought I'd never see you again."

"It'll be okay," Chobasi says.

"It's her!" Yukai and Onayi gasp together as she enters the mess hall. They look at each other, realizing many things.

"Can everyone see me?" Queen Lucita squeaks.

The children who can are happy to see her, but deeply concerned to see who is at her side: the director of the Kutsui shelter. Seeing the concern of those in front, Satomi squeals, "What's wrong? Lemme see!"

Lucy takes an empty wash basin from the floor and flips it over, then, steps up on it, holding her arms out to keep her balance, "Hi, fellas!" she cheers with a quivering voice. "It's Lucy, some of you have met me before."

"_Queen_ Lucy?" Onayi quivers.

Yukai grabs him out of concern for the potential consequences of his poor manners in front of Laputa's royalty.

"Yes," she nods, "Queen Lucy." She sighs, then says, "The director of one of your shelters has returned for you, accusing us of kidnapping you. Your government has demanded your return..."

She's drowned out by the terrified crying of ninety-five children. She crouches on the washbasin, until she's below the eye level of the director. She studies his face as he studies the children. It seems to her that he's looking forward to meting out a punishment on the rebellious runaways, and that he takes pleasure in seeing them quake at the sight of him. An evil smirk spreads across his lips to complement the evil glint in his eye. So evil that Lucy is suddenly glad at how much time has passed since she last ate, lest her previous meal rudely deposit itself upon his boots.

She stands, and nearly in tears, asserts her royal authority, "Please calm down ... please." † It takes a few minutes for the children to realize that she really is in charge.

"I know, you all chose to come here," she says, "Twenty-eight of you came by yourselves, without even trying to find my friends on your side of the border first. You broke the rules and came to our gate, and _we_ broke the rules to let you in. For the other sixty-seven," she pauses, "my consul Kurisutai broke our rules by staying in your country after she was recalled. Your country has demanded her extradition so that she may be executed as a spy," suddenly, she remembers the reading level of her audience, "Your government wants to _kill_ her for breaking the rules to help you."

"Christie!" Satomi bawls, "Oh, no!" Many of the other children share her anguish.

"A lot has been given up for you, parentless children of Kutsui and Hinoan," Lucy uses her remarkable ability to project her voice over the cacophony while still sounding like she's speaking barely over a whisper, "I therefore leave it up to you. I, Lucita Toelle Uru Laputa, grant you status as residents of Laputa, the province of Jenwa, if you choose to claim it. This man has no power over you now. You may now, if you wish, step forward and give your hand to him, if you want to return to your home country of Vendoa. But you will return to his custody if you do."

They stand there for twenty minutes, and not a single child steps forward. All prefer Lucy's offer to their Vendoan birthright.

While they were doing so, Lucy's stenographer, writing unnoticed beside the door, took the sheet from her pad and gave it to the copyist. The latter brushed a light wax over it, then upon that, a black powder. As the copyist poured away the excess black dust, Kutsui shelter's director glanced over and realized that Lucy's stenographer had been writing backwards the whole time. The dust had adhered only to the ink of Lucy's words, and as the copyist set a sheet over the backwards original and rolled a purple rolling pin over it, only the words would be transferred to the new sheet. The copyist lifted the copy, with the properly oriented words on it, and waited until Lucy finally said:

"It is decided then: Formerly children in the care of-"

"_Care?_" Satomi grunts, "Hmph!"

None of the other children object to this interruption while Lucy politely pauses, a few even chuckle. The room became so quiet that the stenographer's scratching felt pen could be heard recording the child's remark.

"_Formerly_ children in the care of Vendoan state authorities," Lucy continues, "twelve in the Hinoan children's shelter, and eighty-three in the Kutsui children's shelter. I welcome you as residents of the Jenwa province of Laputa, hopefully to be adopted by the adult citizens who live here." She weeps, "Welcome to Laputa."

The children start hugging and cheering as the director grits his teeth. He just lost over a quarter of his shelter's population.

"Sir," Lucy says softly, handing him the rolled transcript sealed with purple wax, "your copy of the transcript." She is looking up into his eyes, as she is now down from the washbasin, as he studies the seal of the queen: a ball with a caring face hovering above its resting place, a pedestal with flowing branches reaching out for the sky around it, over the mouth of a warm smile. He is not happy at all, but Lucy can tell, there is a part of him that is relieved at the outcome, a part of him that actually cares.

[* If translated to Japanese, this "question" should not end in "ka". Also, in Greek, there is a form of question that implies that it is rhetorical with an implied negative answer: while a semantically precise translation to English would be, "Did you want to do it?", the personality of such a question is better conveyed "You didn't want to do it, did you?" This form is close enough to her meaning. † In Japanese, it would be "...onegai shimasu ... wo kudasai" to emphasize the wild mix of social strata in this situation; both a royal "please" and a common "please". I "katakanized" Christa's name to convey Lucy's formality, even though she isn't speaking in Japanese. Then after, Satomi doesn't quite say it right because she's getting too emotional.]

[From the movie: The insignia I described is visible right up close at 42min.]


	6. Chapter 6

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 6

Lucy walks slowly down the aisle of the bus filled with children, and a few adults, her consuls. Only six more children showed up over the next two days after the first ninety-five, raising the total to a hundred and one. She uses many gestures, and few words, touching many hands and heads. The onagers seem impatient to get moving, especially after Lucy hand feeds them each a treat. Each bus is pulled by four such mules, and finally, the evacuation convoy gets rolling north towards Laputa.

They hear the beating of drums and the racket of marching outside the wall, and Lucy suddenly sees another reason for the onagers to be anxious. Two days before the Laputan declaration of war becomes effective, Vendoa is marching on Jenwa.

General Tali smiles.

"What's so funny?" Lucy asks as her royal taxi is about to pull away from the customs fort, to take up the rear of the convoy of children's buses.

"It is likely that Kutsui and Hinoan's populations are in the logistics train of the Vendoan attack force," he explains.

"They would send children into battle?" she gasps with alarm.

"No," the general says, "although I'm not _totally_ certain of that." He sighs, "They draft the shelter children to serve as auxilliaries in emergencies, like the landslide in Hitashea last month. They will probably be here to patch the wounded, bury the dead, and clean up the mess after the battle."

"That doesn't seem like anything to smile about," Lucy pouts as her taxi starts to move, "Carry on, General."

Lucy does understand his smile, though. General Tali commands a tiny division with a big goal: liberating the children of Vendoa. It is a near certainty that he has a flanking action in mind for his forces, as the Vendoan army routs in front of the main force of General Moggai, Tali will rescue the children in their rear area before the main force tramples them on their way to Tekiton.

BAM!

The startled acceleration of Lucy's white horses throws her aides against the taxi's seats. She pushes away the make-up swabs and turns to look, just in time to see about twenty Laputan soldiers land after they were thrown into the air by a huge explosion.

Somehow, Vendoa blew a twenty abreast hole in the customs fort wall!

Quickly, she looks at the crystal hanging from her neck, which remains a dark blue. If kuuseki had anything to do with that explosion, it would be glowing. She breathes a sigh of relief, now wondering what may have caused it.

There is another!

"Your Majesty!" an officer screams as he grabs hold of her taxi wagon, climbing onto the rear fender, "Vendoa has broken through our lines; many of their troops are using hand thrown bombs. We don't know anything about these. Some of their chariots have large bombs for blowing up the fort's walls and tight formations. Keeping the formations tight makes them vulnerable to these devices, while loosening them up to reduce the casualties leaves them vulnerable to calvary charge. We're in trouble!"

"It's not kuuseki," she says, "so I'm reluctant to call our wardens."

"Ma'am," the officer says, "There's a storm brewing as well. The animals will not be able to go fast enough through it. We are _personally_ in danger, Your Majesty."

"The weather may work to our advantage," she grunts, then grits her teeth, closes her eyes, and says, "Help me rekindle the light."

_Rite ratobarita urusu ariarosu baru netorirru._

Her taxi lights up the evening sky and a beam of light cuts through the weather ahead, leading to the royal castle in the capital of Laputa.

Romu is quite stunned to see this. It is already raining on the castle. Quickly, he rushes from the throneroom to the lower garden and to the black console, "General Moggai, can you hear me?" he asks.

The answer comes faintly back, "Your Majesty! The battle goes well," although Romu can hear the sounds of hand-to-hand fighting in the background, "The Vendoans used the chemical explosives you referred to breach the customs fort, and sent a calvary squadron through our formations, which were out of order as a result of the explosions. They are clear behind us and chasing the queen's convoy. My reserve is closing the gap in our lines as we speak, and the enemy has run out of hand bombs already."

Romu is able to bring up the General's face on a virtual viewer, even though he doesn't have the control stone. In the background, he can see the battle in the mess hall as General Moggai's forces take it back, "The queen's convoy is being pursued, you say?"

"Yes, sir," the General nods.

"Romu," the queen's voice seems to emanate from the walls of the room. It actually comes from the lower garden's large kuuseki crystal, which is the major source of the capitol building's special power, "My garden warden is here, don't worry about me. General Moggai might be in trouble, though."

"He's fine, my love," Romu says warmly, "I learned of the Vendoan bombs last week and warned him with a courier yesterday. The console let me open a channel to him just now."

The garden warden, the same one that feeds the pigeons every morning, landed on the road behind the queen's taxi and cut off the yokes and the wheels of the persuing Vendoan chariots with its head lasers. The Vendoan hand bombs had no effect on it. After this, it accepts their surrender, making them stand there in the rain until General Moggai can spare a contingent to tie them up. No one was hurt in the pursuit of the queen.

"My love," Romu says, "clearly the Vendoans are enough of a threat to go to war against. When you get back, can you meet me in the lower garden, please?"

"Okay," she says softly, "I have a few guests coming though. 101 Vendoan shelter children ran away to us. I have General Tali's special unit rescuing more. He has a lot of discretion in his methods. I trust him."

"See you when you get back, love," he says.

Back in the royal taxi, which is still behind the onager-pulled children's buses, all of which roll along a dry cobble road with rain falling on the fields to either side, Lucy asks, "Captain, what do you know about these Vendoan things."

"We only got this information last week," he begins, "Three years ago, a Hinoan child had discovered a mixture which violently bursts when lit afire. A mixture of sulfur, retort charcoal and potash fertilizer. They began experimenting. Their latest explosive, which they started making only a few weeks ago, involves an acid, a syrup, and some sort of clay. We don't have the details yet; only recently have Romu's spies penetrated their operations."

"Hinoan child?" Lucy asks. She vaguely remembers a child with a fantastic tale about a mixture he had come up with to split rocks during a mine rescue his shelter's children were participating in. His shelter treated him very badly after that, locking him up in a stone box for several months until he had sworn to tell no one he had any idea of such a substance's existence. He didn't say anything to her until a year after he had been adopted by a Jenwan family, part of her rescue network, and this treatment turned out to be the main reason he had so stubbornly persisted in his efforts become Laputan.

"Your special operations know something?" the captain asks.

"I'll find out," she says, "I may have some information about this child."

"Do you think he might be in this convoy?" he asks.

She shakes her head briefly, "It's not likely. I need to make sure it isn't who I'm thinking of, first."

"How can such a foolish society do such things?" the captain mutters.

"Not _everyone_ in Vendoa is a fool," she sighs, "but among them, it does seem that the children are wisest. When you believe in your own power ... that's when you become a ... fool," she whispers, her hand tight around the kuuseki crystal hanging from her neck.

[From the movie: Lucy's incantation is used in the movie by Sheeta at 52min, with similar effects (beam of light, protective robot, wacky changes in the weather.) The incantation was transliterated from the Japanese subtitles.

From elsewhere: The explosives the captain describes are gunpowder and dynamite. The general technology outside the castle is quite far behind the movie, with the exception of dynamite and kuuseki. My own date for the movie events is about 1880 in its own calendar, with the shown technology level being roughly equivalent to 1880AD in real life, with some obvious exceptions in the field of aviation. The picture taken by Pazuu's father at 17min is clearly marked "1868.7" in Arabic numerals, implying a date of July 1868. His airship is similar to that of Henri Giffard's 1852 model, except for the Miyazaki helium making it about a third the length, and with a much larger gondola (Giffard's actual airship used hydrogen and would have burst into flames under the movie's circumstances (_Hindenburg_ was not the first to do so), however, the ventral tailpipes on the airship of Pazuu's father are consistent with ninteenth-century hydrogen airship design: keep your exhaust, which will contain sparks, as far away from the flammable hydrogen envelope as possible.) His camera appears to be very similar to Talbot's original 1835 model, but it needed technology from 1889 to take a useful picture under the circumstances (i.e. Petzval's optics and Eastman's dry film; perhaps that slipped past Miyazaki, or he decided to overlook it.) This implies that events in _Shattered Elegance_ are no earlier than 1160AD, while the events themselves suggest a date around 2243BC; Obviously I've decided to overlook this inconsistency! If the events in the movie are actually set around 1535BC (708 years after 2243BC), the Antikythera Mechanism (a real-life artifact built with an apparent 1600AD state-of-the-art in clockwork and astronomy, but was actually built by the ancient Greeks in about 150BC) would seem rather quaint.

More from elsewhere: After learning of Miyazaki's original inspiration of Cardiff's coal mines in Wales, and also that the Imperial Japanese Navy used this high quality coal in the Russo-Japanese War, I believe he intended to portray the world in an approximately 1906 state of the art, although the radios are actually up in the 1930s, with tubes and superhets, it's almost strange that they don't appear capable of transmitting a voice signal.]


	7. Chapter 7

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 7

"Ma'am," the officer says, panting ponies behind him at the end of the walk enjoying the rest, but not the gentle rain, "I really don't know what this is about."

Examining the seal on the rolled letter, the blonde-haired lady remarks, "I ... don't recognize this seal, but it sure is pretty."

"It's the queen's," the courier says.

"What?" she gasps, "A _royal _summons?"

"He's not in trouble, ma'am," he says quickly, "but Her Majesty didn't tell me anything else."

She turns her head back into the house and calls, "Pazuu! Quickly! You're not going to believe this!"

A broad-shouldered dark-haired teenager [older than the movie's Pazuu] rushes to his mother's side, "Mama? Oh, company!" Seeing the well-dressed officer, he puts the clean end of the stick he's holding into his mouth, and wipes from his hand the black grease onto his coveralls before offering it to shake.

"Forgive me," the officer bows, not accepting his handshake.

"No problem," says Pazuu, taking the proffered letter, "What's this?" He jokingly adds, "Forging the queen's royal seal is a serious-" He stops speaking instantly after opening the letter, then gasps, "It's real?"

"Yes, sir," the officer says, "and for your eyes only."

"Except for the part about accompanying you to the detachment for a ride to Laputa, I think." He folds the top half of the letter down and shows him the part he's referring to at the bottom.

"What is that?" he asks about the black stuff on his stick.

"Oh?" Pazuu finally takes it from his mouth, "Grease for the windmill bearing. The charcoal helps it turn more efficiently. It's so slick, you almost need cleats in the workshop," he grins, "Give me thirty seconds to wash it off my hands and get out of my shop clothes."

He takes thirty-two, but the courier is quite astonished at how much he shined up in that period.

"Wait, Pazuu," his mother says, "When will you be back? They need you at the wagon shop since the army grabbed half the fleet for the evacuation!"

"I have no idea!" he says, "Just hope the war is really short!"

She cringes at that remark as her husband comes up to her side, "What was that about?"

"The queen summoned him to Laputa," she quivers, then turns and cries, "I think he's been drafted into the army."

"Can you ride?" the courier points at the second pony at the side of the narrow street.

"Not really, but I'll try," Pazuu says.

"I'm not surprised about the _ride to Laputa_ part," he says, "I usually deliver messages to generals, not kids on the eastern end of nowhere, the only part of Jenwa that isn't being evacuated right this hour. You must be important."

"I get that a lot," Pazuu says. The pony he's sitting on tentatively steps sideways, rather confused, "Uh ... follow him, please," he says, patting the timid animal.

"Hold onto her collar straps, not the reins like me," the courier pats his own animal's harness. At last he whistles, and both ponies take off down the street at an eager gallop.

"Uwaaaaah!" Pazuu cries, hanging on for dear life as his pony follows exactly the path of the courier's, dodging wagons and rickshaws as she speeds along.

"Don't worry!" the courier calls back, "She does this all the time!"

As they race by the wagon shop, the blacksmith, looking out the window to investigate the noise, recognizes him and mutters, "I didn't think the army needed axle grease _that_ badly."

The queen arrives in the lower garden of the castle and greets the king, "Romu, my love."

The big crystal seems to glow a bit brighter at her arrival.

"Lucy," he says, turning from the console momentarily.

"What is that?" she asks.

"Moggai was forced to give ground," Romu explains, "Vendoa's taken half of Jenwa."

"You said that was impossible," she gasps.

"I thought it was," he says, "but I think ... that it's time to dust off Laputa's special power. Show them who God is."

"If God wants to show Himself, let Him do that," she weeps, "We're not the judge of the sins of other nations."

Romu turns to face his queen, and gently explains, "You know how to refine kuuseki, right?"

"The basics anyway," she nods, "The _secret_ the other nations keep asking for isn't one at all, but many, many widely known principles. Just like life."

"Refined noble gas, high temperatures, low pressures, and certain types of radiation..." he explains.

"That we've forgotten about," Lucy says, "What is our sin, Romu? Why can Vendoa now build bombs that we of Laputa can't?"

"We are the greatest nation on Earth," Romu says, "You know that, my love. You help me lead her into a bright and shining future. Help me again. Let me borrow your stone, and we'll show the Vendoans."

"No," she says softly, but insistently, "at least give them their two days. Please, my love. We aren't supposed to break our promises, even to our traitors."

Romu's impatience slowly dissipates, and he says at last, "You're right ... But do remember, they were out to kill you tonight."

There is a tap on the door, "Lucita, Your Majesty?" someone asks.

"I better get that," she says to the king, then backs away. After she gets out into the corridor, the courier she sent to the eastern village says, "He's here."

"Already?" she gasps, "Where is he?" She races topside to greet her latest guest.

Once in the upper garden, she sees the muscular teenager, "Pazuu!" she embraces him, "How you've grown."

"Thanks again, Lucy," he says, "I didn't know you lived here. You must be one of the queen's own servants, now. Congratulations."

"Oh?" she blushes, "I thought you knew back when I billeted you at the customs house two years ago."

"Knew what?" he asks.

"Lucy's short for Lucita," she says, "I don't _try_ to hide it."

"Lucita?" he asks sheepishly.

"...Toelle Uru Laputa," she finishes, almost dreamily.

His jaw drops as she pulls the blue stone from under her collar. "Oh, I'm sorry if I was rude," he bows his head.

"What is it?" she smiles, "I don't _demand _respect just because I'm the queen."

"The town's mayor demands respect," Pazuu says.

She seems disappointed to hear that, but smiles again and says, "I called you here because the Vendoans are using your explosive compound against us, and also ... a more powerful one."

"I only made the one," he whispers, "and only at that mine. Are you sure it's mine?"

She shakes her head, "Not completely certain. I'll show you what they have and if you can tell me."

She shows him one of the small hand bombs that Tali's forces had captured when it failed to explode, "It had been tossed back and forth like a play ball several times before one of our men realized it was a dud. We filled it with water and froze it to crack it open."

He smiles, "smart idea." Examining the dark powder, he says, "Yes, Your Majesty, that's the stuff."

"Our intelligence unit said that a child from Hinoa invented it three years ago," she says, "I uh ... thought you were from Kutsui, actually."

He nods, "Please, don't get me to make them for you. They shouldn't be used to kill people ... and part of me cares about Vendoa."

"So do I," she says, "Actually, I've got something else in mind for you. Something _much_ different."

"Oh?" he says.

"Unlike most of these kids, you're an _actual_ orphan," she says.

"It makes little difference, really," he sighs, "Abandoned by my parents, or abandoned by the government they died for made little difference to the bottom line."

"The government they died for marched about seven hundred kids from Kutsui to Tekiton," she pauses for a tear, "...to build these for their war against us."

"We have to get them out of there!" he cries, "These things must be handled carefully, and the miners I trained on the powder for that rescue ... two of them died because they didn't take the proper precautions. Kids are not careful enough, I know!" He points at a scar on his left cheek, "I remember how I got this myself."

"You ... know a lot about windmills these days?" Lucy asks.

He nods.

"Can you make one that will push the air, rather than get work from it?" she asks.

"Yes," he says nervously, "but you'd need like, a river or something to power it, and I can't see what for."

She unhooks the string on her signet stone, "We do if it's a vehicle that has nothing else to push besides air. It will be powered by Vendoa's newer explosive, which is more powerful than yours."

"Sound's dangerous," he cautions, "But, why would a vehicle have only-" he suddenly stops, puts his hand over his open mouth.

The blue signet stone glows and hovers after she let go of it. She gives it a gentle tap to send it floating through the air towards him, its strings dangling underneath it.

"It can make bigger things float," she explains, "Wagons and rocks, towers. There's one big enough to lift this entire castle, and a system designed to defend it from the air, should a war go _really_ badly."

"Can you turn it off?" he asks, holding his hand out under the floating stone.

She makes a slight wave, and the glowing stone dims and drops into his hand, "Yes," she confirms.

"And back on?" he asks.

The queen nods, "But we can't make it go forward into the wind," she says.

Pazuu smiles, "I can, but a flying _windmill_ is not the best way."

"How do you know?" she asks.

"Because I've seen birds soar against the wind without flapping their wings," Pazuu explains, pulling a model bird out of his pocket. As he tosses it through the air towards her, he adds, "I've even made a few."

"Wow," she says, catching it, "What do you need to make a _big_ one?"

"The wings hold it up," he explains, "so the bigger it is, the stronger they need to be. The air is something like the banks of a river to a set of wings, so I think a big one would be built something like a bridge."

"I'll get you the country's best bridge builder by this time tomorrow," she promises, "Do what you can in the workshop upstairs until then. We'll get those kids out of Tekiton."

[From the movie: At first, I didn't want to name anyone after Pazuu, but it kinda happened anyway. This character is based on Pazuu in other ways as well: he's the mechanical and aerodynamic genius of his day, and at 1:39 in the movie, Pazuu gets shot in his left cheek by one of Muska's bodyguards. Also, Pazuu is a couple years older in _Shattered Elegance_, that meaning, he's as old as James Van Der Beek was when he voiced the original Pazuu in English (but don't _imagine_ Van Der Beek, he was a scrawn at the time.) On kuuseki: Pomu-jiisan's briefing, I would like to ask Miyazaki if he got any inspiration for the cave scene from Luke 19:40 "If these should hold their peace, the stones would cry out." Pomu-jiisan's words 33min: "Oh, my gracious! That's a kuuseki crystal, my dear." It may be significant that he did not recognize the seal. "I've never seen one before. That's why the rocks were stirring. I thought only Laputans knew how to make kuuseki crystals." After this scene, I imagined that refining kuuseki was actually very difficult to do, but slightly easier than making carbon crystals (i.e.: artificial diamonds, achieved by Beltzar von Platen in 1953, and independently by General Electric in 1954, at pressures in the realm of 8400MPa), except for a variety of conditions that make the raw material difficult to preserve. If these events are set in 2243BC and the movie, subsequently in 1535BC, it is plausible that the Earth would have run out of raw kuuseki by the modern era, making a certain Studio Ghibli film the only remaining evidence of its existence. ;) "My grandfather told me the rocks shift when Laputa floats overhead. Young lady, your stone is most powerful ... A stone so powerful brings happiness, but it can also bring misery. What's more, your stone is the work of men. I thought I should-" At this point, Pazuu interrupts him; it is likely that Pomu recognized that Sheeta was descended from Laputans, and this of course, comes out only four minutes later. I actually have a very specific theory about certain kuuseki stones that has a real-life equivalent, but that would be a spoiler at this point. The "lower garden" is seen in the movie from 1:42 to 1:50; in this story, it is not overgrown with roots and grass, although it is likely that Lucy and her ancestors are likely to have decorated it with a few planters.]


	8. Chapter 8

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 8

"Want to try it out, ma'am" Pazuu smiles.

"Senchou tooyodi," Lucy giggles as she climbs aboard the two-seat wooden glider.

"Huh?" Pazuu asks.

"Never mind," she says, "I'm kidding, anyway. Subarashii! This is quite an accomplishment for one day in the shop," she remarks.

Pazuu doesn't get the joke, since he's never heard such words before. "I won't crash into the ceiling," he says, "I've already noticed that the air sinks near the tree and rises near the walls."

"How?" she asks, "It's my own garden and _I_ didn't know that."

He laughs, "I was watching the birds. It's their business to know how air moves. I have seven doves at home, you should come see them."

"Some day, I will," she promises, "Are you ready?" [Could be a while, i.e. 13min into the movie.]

He nods, grasping his two sticks and putting his feet on the pedals.

"How do you control it?" she asks.

"Oh," he says, "These two sticks control those hinges on the wings. I call those ailerons, they'll make the craft roll." He taps his feet on the pedals, "These control the tail. Left and right for the rudder," he demonstrates, "and together for up and down."

"You obviously know what you're doing, Pazuu," she says.

"I hope so. I've never been in the air myself," he admits. "I could make one to catch the air coming out of the valley, but it would need to be quite a bit lighter, probably by pulling a silk canvas over a frame."

"Kiwada," she sighs, "Sounds expensive."

"That's what you call it?" he asks.

"Call what?" she asks, "Canvas?"

"Whatever," he smiles, "Let's try her out."

"Be ready," she warns, "It might happen suddenly." She holds her signet crystal softly, and says, "Help us return to the sky."

_Rite ratobarita hureite karione ariarosu karesitai. _[This is Laputan, not Japanese.]

The stone lights up and the craft lifts off.

"Oh," Pazuu gasps, struggling to steady the wobbling craft, "It wants to go _straight _up!" The glider bucks and pitches to the vertical, "Turn it off!" he cries.

"Isurei!" she says, and the crystal goes dim.

Pazuu soon has the craft under control, gliding back towards the garden's floor. The flight lasts only thirty seconds before settling back into the grass. The two pant after the craft comes to its abrupt stop.

"Lift-off needs work," he says, "and turning was harder than I expected."

"What happened?" she asks.

"I think the down wing generates less resistance than the up wing, so the plane wants to twist the other way-" [He is describing a real-life problem of early aircraft.]

"During lift-off?" she asks.

"Oh," he says, "I thought you were asking about the turning. Well, the crystal lifts us straight up, and the wings stalled upside down, made us turn into the direction of travel, which was like..."

"Straight up," she finishes.

"Queen Lucita," the courier timidly pokes his head into the garden, "The boss..." she hears him say, but the rest of what he says is gobbledegook to her ears.

"It's safe now," she says, disembarking from Pazuu's craft, "Come on in. Oh, and what did you say before? I didn't hear you right."

"Oyagata is here," the courier, the same one that brought Pazuu, explains, "The bridge engineer you sent for yesterday, Your Majesty."

"Pazuu," the muscular guest in the blue shirt says, "Your reputation precedes you ... at least in my circles." He shakes hands with the teenager, then turns to the queen and gravely says, "I hope the war isn't going so badly that we need to start blowing bridges up."

"Oh," she gasps, "No, no. The wardens can do that if it comes down to it." She pets the wing of Pazuu's craft, "We need a big bird to evacuate the children from Tekiton. They have been pressed to build bombs for the Vendoan army and are in grave danger. The aircraft will be operating with the new division under General Tali, which I formed last week specifically for this task."

"Oh?" he says.

"I didn't think we were going to do it by air," she sighs, "but yes, the war with Vendoa is going badly, and their children are building things that can kill them, so rescuing them is more urgent than I expected."

"Your Majesty," he says, "I know you really care for the Vendoan children; it matters enough that I remember the name of one _Onayi_ you interrupted a conversation with me for when you were inspecting Main Street in Jenwa last summer. I do want to help, but I don't see how. I build bridges, not flying machines, Your Majesty."

"Pazuu," she grasps, "I hope you can explain."

"Hey, boss," he starts with a slight bow, "The queen can use her crystal to lift us off, but once up, the wings will hold up the craft and fly forward using the air. The load, in the body here," gesturing to his craft's gondola-like fuselage, "is held up in the middle like the weight in the middle of a bridge. The whole wing is held up by the air, so I thought that inside, it would be built something like a bridge."

"Can I see what you've done?" the engineer asks.

"Oh, sure," Pazuu says, then pulls a pin out of a ventral panel in the wing of the craft. He slides the panel out of its numerous mortices to remove it, and gently sets the crafted piece of plywood against the aircraft's fuselage. "Two spars," he points, "These are solid, but the bigger ones would probably need to be made like a bridge, and maybe the wing can get away with one such spar. The bridge leading to East Isle," he digs in his mind for details he hasn't paid much attention to.

"It's a truss bridge," Oyagata explains, "Not one of mine, but still a sound design." He looks into the wing, "I won't do you much good if there is only this much space to put such a structure in."

"Oh," the queen says, "This is a small one. The big one needs to carry two hundred people. A large enough force that Tali can defend where we land from Tekiton's home guard."

"Also," Pazuu explains, "This wing is thinner than I'd like, anyway. The shop couldn't make the thick wing I wanted quickly enough that I could try it out before you got here."

"Really?" Oyagata looks inside, "Forgive me, but this really does look like a rush job. I can think of many ways to build it lighter. How long did it take you to build it?"

"Fourteen hours yesterday," Pazuu says to a shocked bridge builder, "Lucy lent me her shop with over twenty craftsman."

"I'd ask you to make the big one as quickly," Lucy sighs, "but I think I'll have to settle for longer. Can we try to make it one week?"

"You want me to build a flying machine large enough to carry two hundred equipped soldiers in one week, when," he gestures to the craft next to him, "as far as I know, this is the only craft in existence capable of carrying a slight queen and a teenage boy." He takes a closer look at it, "How does it get off the ground? I don't see anyway it could even move." He pushes on it; the craft is quite solidly caught in the grass on its skids, "Do you push it or something?"

"Go to the shop and get us some rope, please," Lucy orders the courier, "hurry." Turning to Pazuu, she says, "Please, can you take me up again?"

Pazuu scratches his head, "Are you sure it's safe enough, Ma'am?"

"Will be shortly," she says as the courier returns, "Thank you." Offering the rope to Pazuu, she says, "I'll tie myself into the seat with this. You can do the same."

"Okay," Pazuu says, "since this time, I'm not going to try to keep her level, I'll just pull her straight into the climb."

She nods, "Sounds good."

Oyagata looks on skeptically as they get ready to lift off. He even laughs as Pazuu so seriously and solidly grips the two sticks with his hands before the glider has shown any signs of life. His jaw drops when the craft suddenly lifts straight off the ground, pointing at the sky.

[From the movie: "Isurei" is "Silence" in Laputan (by my reckoning; this is not in the movie), and "Hurry!" in Japanese, apparently deactivating the crystal in Sheeta's possession at 58min (I looked to make sure it wasn't uttered during Sheeta's two floating scenes at 8min and 25min.) "Oyagata" is a Japanese word for "boss", the movie character whom the bridge builder is named after. Madge, his daughter in the movie, is less significant: she is named at 18min, twenty seconds before her on-screen debut at Oyagata's house (Japanese subtitles label her line, "Kaisokou? Miidou!", confirming her name); she has another cameo at 46min. I noticed after I came up with the incantation for Lucy, that one of the words is similar to the Japanese for "open" used in the movie at 1:50.]


	9. Chapter 9

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 9

The craft circles the tree once, around the far side, then lands in front of Oyagata, coming to an abrupt halt. As it does so, Pazuu smacks his head on the crossbar in front of the cockpit and rubs his forehead after.

"Daizyobu?" Lucy asks in concern.

"Huh?" Pazuu says, "I hope I'm okay, but what you said sounded _really_ weird just now."

"I can get you something from the herbalist," she explains, "but you're not bleeding. If you don't start feeling dizzy or sleepy in the next few minutes, you should be fine."

"I'm fine, it won't even bruise," he says, hopping from the glider, "My head's harder than fired brick, just ask the blacksmith in my village. The bully broke two bones in his hand last time he hit me two weeks ago."

She chuckles at that.

"I think she needs a little more in the fin," he says casually, "She likes to shimmee in the turns."

"Shimmee?" she asks as she gets out of her seat, having taken all this time to untie the rope with her trembling fingers.

"My turn to say something weird," he chuckles.

"How do you know that little crystal's going to lift the big one?" Oyagata asks.

"I know," she says, "Just trust me on that."

"Sounds like today wasn't _your_ first time in the air," Pazuu says.

The queen silently nods, tucking the stone behind the collar of her pink royal gown.

"Sorry, I'm going to start talking weird again," Pazuu says, "I think the big one needs to climb at a negative alpha. I don't want her to pitch up too violently, especially with youngers aboard." He sighs, "Youngers is a Vendoan word you should know, Lucy ... it refers to children under the age of six. Over six, they become elders. I don't think they'd have youngers building those bombs."

"Wait," Oyagata says, "Did you just say Vendoan _children_ are making the _bombs_ for their army?"

"Yes," the queen says, "My intel is quite strong on that, and yes, I knew those words"

"One week it is," Oyagata sighs, "Pazuu, I know where the drafting room is, let's go over the details." As he starts out of the garden with the boy, he decides to clarify with the queen, "He _is_ allowed in there, right?"

The queen nods, "Yes, but I have to let you in. The door won't open ... well," she sighs, "Actually, you guys wouldn't even be able to find it."

"Wait till you see _this,_" Oyagata smiles at Pazuu.

The drafting room is part of the Luputan castle's core, between the upper and lower gardens. Pazuu starts reading one of the walls, an ancient battle he'd written an essay about in school after he immigrated to Laputa. Once done a section, he notices a curious little carat in the lower right hand corner. Curiously, he reaches for it, but before he quite touches the stone carved emblem, it flashes red, and he gasps as the text in front of him transforms. "I'm sorry, did I mess it-"

"Relax, it's just the next page," Oyagata explains, "Touch any thing you want to see what it does. You can't do anything dangerous without a control crystal. Takes a couple hours to get used to it, though. This is a library with every bit of information Laputa's ever had."

Pazuu notices that the window that he thought would look onto a courtyard actually reveals a tall, open space with large stone cubes floating around in it.

"A good chunk of it is on refining kuuseki," the queen says.

"Oh, there you are my love," Romu says from the door.

"Has General Moggai stopped their advance," Lucy asks.

"Yes," the king answers, "For now." He then sighs deeply, "You trust these two with high level intel?"

"They already have quite a bit," Lucy confirms.

Romu sighs, "You're not going to want to hear this, my love. Their advance is stalled because an armory exploded in Tekiton, destroyed a significant piece of their supply chain."

"No!" Pazuu cries, running to Lucy's side.

"The Vendoan public outlets have not released casualty figures," he says, "I don't have anyone near. I was hoping you could-"

"They were _children!_" Pazuu cries.

Lucy grips his shoulder to calm him, "It's true," Lucy says, "Intel from General Tali. I don't know how he gets it. Talk to him, and get back to me please, I'm really busy right now."

"The crystal?" he asks.

"May I keep it for a few more days?" she says, "since the advance has halted, we don't need to summon the wardens right away, and you _know_ Moggai sees that as cheating. We are trying to rescue those children."

Romu chuckles harshly, "I know Tali has a crack force and all, but three battalions won't make it to Tekiton under these conditions."

"Not on the ground," she says, "We'll _fly_ them out. That's why I need to keep it."

"Lucy, are you _mad?_" the king gasps, "You'd have to be _on board _to control the crystal and its lift ... into the Vendoan _capital?_ That's insane!"

"It has to be done," she says, "if we're to have _any_ hope of swaying the Vendoan people to our rule. Is it not a worse insanity to let them kill their own children?"

Romu nods, "Okay, but do us all one favour while you're out there, my love."

Lucy waits for an answer, with a gentle hum.

"Make sure those bomb factories don't survive your rescue," he says, "Those damn things have killed enough of our people."

Lucy seems a little perplexed. "Sumimasen?" she says.

"I really mean it," Romu says.

"Oh, sorry, my love," she says, "Just for a moment, you sounded like gibberish. Could you explain that again? It must have been really important."

After repeating himself, she nods; promise enough for him. Worried, he sneaks off to the herbalist and asks him to find out if she's on anything. She seems to be losing her marbles.

Arriving at the lower garden and black console, he opens a channel to General Tali. A pair of concerned sparrows land on his right shoulder, "What?" he grumbles, "How did you get in here!" He chases them away while waiting for Tali to answer. The little birds cling to a vine climbing the far wall, chattering at each other.

"King Romu," Tali answers, "Glad you called. Has the queen told you her plans for the Tekiton airlift?"

"Yes," the king says, "She told me to call you. An armory exploded in Tekiton, she was wondering if you had any casualty figures."

It is at this moment that Romu notices that Tali had been crying. "Romu, try to break it to her gently," he starts, "It was a storage bunker near the north wall ... They had the youngers carrying them from the smithy ... This was told to me by a supervisor who was freaked out and defected because their latest batch was unstable. It didn't have enough clay to stabilize the mixture, he said, and they were sweating the ... he called it azosyrup, one of the ingredients. I don't have exact figures yet, but the royal harlem went on strike after the blast, so I'm pretty sure some of their youngers were killed. They are what we would call princes and princesses, not shelter kids. Their youngers live in the castle."

"I get it," Romu says. Those filthy Vendoans are so stubborn. If they won't bend to Laputan compassion, we'll have to rule them with an iron fist. He fumes, pushing away the memory of Lucy warning him that war would solidify the more righteous elements of Vendoan society against Laputa. He didn't want to believe that had happened.

"When it comes out," General Tali groans, "They will blame the deaths of these children on us. They are already claiming that we are working the 101 that defected to us as slaves in Jenwan kuuseki mines, and that many of those are dead already."

Romu burns with rage, "They will _pay_ for that!" Then closes the channel.

[From the movie: It is evident that aircraft must be much easier to engineer in the world of Laputa than in the real world. Both the Dola Flaptors and Pazuu's own aircraft (the unfinished one in his workshop that gets only a few cameo appearances at 15-17min) are ornithopters. In reality, ornithoptors are _very_ difficult to engineer, which of course, makes nature's birds all the more remarkable. The world also must have a different way of measuring altitude besides barometric pressure, or the Tiger Moth pilot's statement, "The mercury's sinking" at 1:20 would make no sense, since the most likely cause of such a pressure drop would be a climb, not a weather system. A friend got a real kick out of watching them hand crank a Flaptor at 50min, and only a few seconds later gasps, "Those things have _rockets?_" Oh, well. "Azosyrup" is a new word I came up with for nitroglycerine, "azote" is an old word for nitrogen, and glycerine is the main ingredient in cough syrup.]


	10. Chapter 10

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 10

Onayi's culinary skills continue to grow under the tutelage of Christa and Satomi. Yukai has decided to work in the shop instead of the kitchen.

Today, Yukai is sanding a piece of laminated wood, a damp bandana over his mouth to keep the dust from entering his lungs. Evidently the trees are much smaller in Laputa than in Vendoa, and the Laputans make big pieces of wood by gluing together many smaller ones.

Chobasi is beside him, working on another. He is sad, almost crying when a hand gently settles on his shoulder. He looks up, "Hotana," he says, "Thanks for teaching me. Am I doing okay?"

The woodworking master says, "_Very_ well, child."

"Child?" he moans, "Only ten and I'm already having my midlife crisis." He grunts as he pushes his chair back along the beam he is working on.

"This is Oyagata," Hotana says, "He's a bridge builder. You must be doing really well if he's come to inspect your work."

Chobasi pauses, looking at the beautiful four foot long piece of wood.

The muscular Oyagata picks the piece up and weighs it in his hands, "It is lovely," he remarks, flipping it over, "And this is the nicest web channel I've seen in a long time." He sets it down, then pats Chobasi on the shoulder, "Do you still have friends in Vendoa?"

"Sir, they marched everyone to Tekiton!" he bawls, "They'll catch what I got there ... and their lives will be ruined just like mine ... And it hurts ... we have to save them!"

"We will," Oyagata says, "would you like to help?"

Yukai takes notice, "Help, how?"

"We'll explain at lunch break," he says. He smiles at Chobasi's impressive piece of wood, "This could be a part of it." He sets it back down.

He takes Hotana aside and explains, "We don't have a lot of time, so you'll need to train each in a small part of making these, such things as mixing the glue, setting the pieces. You know the details better than I. These are parts drawings," he hands the woodmaster a rolled sheet of paper.

"Lucita?" he gasps at the seal. He opens it and after a glance, says, "Like for a two hundred foot bridge, but..." he notices how thick the stack is, and feels the royal consistency of the paper and print. "What is..."

"The print quality?" Oyagata asks, "The capital's core lithography is pretty impressive, no?"

"The king is ordering a bridge?" he looks around it, "These ... are all different sizes ... and these are-?"

"Skin panels," Oyagata clarifies, "And it's the queen's-"

"What kind of strange bridge is this?" the woodmaster asks, flipping through the pages.

"A flying ship," Oyagata says, "To fly to Tekiton and rescue the children there."

"Is it is bad as-"

"Dinner's ready!" Satomi squeals from the entrance to the shop floor, startling Hotana with her good cheer, "Queen Lucy's with us. She'll be making a special announcement," Satomi is jumping excitedly on her toes as she says this. Twoscore children and half a dozen prospective parents set aside their tools and dust masks to follow her.

"They're pretty jumpy," Hotana remarks as he follows them.

"This time last week they lived in a shelter with a kitchen staff who couldn't care less about the quality of the food," Pazuu says from Oyagata's side, "and that little girl jumped into the Laputan style head first. She'll _vanish _right into that recipe book at this rate!"

"How do _you_ know, little wagon boy?" Hotana scoffs.

"Lucy busted me out of Hinoa two years ago," Pazuu says flatly, "How do I know ... sheesh."

"Oh?" the woodmaster balls up his hands, "How _dare_ you!"

Oyagata puts a hand on his shoulder and says, "Please try to be his friend. He's only had three hours sleep in the last two days learning how to fly and designing the ship."

"Sorry, sir," Pazuu says as he takes a seat in the mess hall, "We Vendoan kids stick together or go bonkers. I've been both."

Both Onayi and Yukai sit down at the same circular table as Pazuu and Oyagata. As Satomi takes the handles of a meal cart, Christie gently rests a hand on her shoulder and says something. Satomi looks over at Lucy and gets a warm smile, then jumps with glee and races between the tables towards the boys.

"Oh!" she squeaks as she reaches her seat next to Onayi, almost falling over, "It's so wonderful to have adults who actually _like_ me!"

"What do you mean?" Onayi asks, "Kutsui's caretakers liked you."

"Oh, pu-_leeease!_" she groans, "Kutsui's caretakers liked me like a pet, always wanting me to stay out of trouble and never letting me help even to sweep the floor like you boys. Making me read the same fairy tale storybooks over and over and taking away my pencils. I had to _really_ hide them, Onayi." She smiles, kicking her legs and hitting the unusually large Oyagata in the shins, "Ooh, sorry," she blushes. Turning back to Onayi, she continues, "Kristie lets me help cook, she wants me to grow up to run a restaurant in her village. I think she's actually _excited_ about me." She pauses for a moment.

"Trying not to get your hopes up about being adopted?" Pazuu asks.

"Adopted?" she asks, "I hope she takes me home. It's great to have somebody like me like that ... but I'm," she seems sad.

"Vendoan?" Pazuu asks, "To a Laputan like that, it doesn't matter. You're not Vendoan anymore."

"How do you know?" Satomi squeaks.

"Because," he says softly, "_I'm_ not Vendoan anymore either. Lucy wants us to build a flying ship to fetch the kids they marched off to Tekiton, there's a picture."

Satomi follows Pazuu's finger towards the serving line, where the beautiful Queen Lucita unrolls a plot of the ship.

More and more of the children are staring at the strange, bird-like beast the queen and woodmaster struggle to hang from a flimsy easel, remarkably, almost oblivious to the meal carts weaving between the tables, consuls and servants setting plates of delicious food in front of them.

"Many of you miss your friends in the Kutsui and Hinoa shelters, right?" Lucy starts projecting her soft voice. "They have been marched to Tekiton, where they now sleep in tents under rainy skies and work in shifts to build dangerous devices that explode to kill our soldiers. It is very dangerous work, in dirty and awful conditions. And they still get the same food as they did at Kutsui, if not worse."

"How could it be worse?" Yukai whispers. With a quick glance around, he can tell many of the other kids are wondering the same thing.

"Ima, Pazuu wa-" she pauses for a moment, "Sumimasen." _God, what's happening to me?_ She closes her eyes and her shoulders bob with a sob. She has this dread that this strange condition that now so frequently isolates her from her people is progressing from sporadic to continuous, and that it may soon be permanent. Once she can understand the hurried whispers of the children again, she starts again, "Right now, Pazuu, over at that table, is designing a flying ship to go to Tekiton and save your friends. This is what we have so far," she gestures to the easel.

"Subarashii no tori!" one of the youngers squeals, a small girl. As she becomes the center of attention at her table, she nervously mutters, "Gomenne."

"You can help build it," Lucy continues nervously as she wanders between the tables, "if you want. You can help us save your friends. Pazuu, Hotana and Oyagata can train you, if you want to grow up to build these, or machines and wagons." She has wandered over to their table, "Some of you are good at cooking," brushing the shoulder of a blushing Satomi, "Others at bridges and wagons. You can be good at anything in Laputa."

As lunch continues, she quietly comes over to the sobbing five year old girl.

"Sorry about her rudeness," the older girl says, "We try to explain things to her, but she can't understand us. Everything she says is gibberish. I have no idea what's happened to her. It started when-"

Lucy suddenly can't understand the obsequeous elder.

"I'm sorry," the little girl squeaks as Lucy gently strokes her hair, "Nobody understands me, anymore. I'm so scared."

Lucy puts a finger over her own mouth and whispers slowly, "Wakarimash'ta. Watashi wa Lushii des'." _I understand you. I'm Lucy._

"How did you?" the elder asks, "Can you understand her?"

"What's her name?" Lucy asks.

"Ochiru," the elder says.

"Ochiru," Lucy says, "could be all of us in these sad days. Ochiru." _Not a name: a word. Falling._ "How long has she been like this?" Lucy asks.

"Since we left Kutsui," the elder says, "I told you that already."

"You can trust me," Lucy says to Ochiru, who is petrified, probably not understanding her, "I'll take you to the herbalist, see if there's anything he knows. His name is Bishop."

[From the movie: "Mama, I'm falling" is a common line. Also, wierd things happen when Sheeta falls. Ochiru is actually named after a character from _Haibane Renmei:_ Rakka, another Japanese word for falling. The name Bishop came out of nowhere; the android of _Aliens_ has this name, but I don't think that's where the inspiration came from.]


	11. Chapter 11

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 11

"Hi," Lucy says as he enters the herbalist's shop, "Bishop, I need your help with something. This little girl and I. Something is affecting our speech. It's happening to me more and more often, but it seems to have hit her very suddenly. Can you see if-" She suddenly notices that the herbalist is looking at her with a lot of surprise and concern, "Bishop ... Can you hear me?"

"Lucy," he starts. After her name, she can't make out a single word.

"Iye," she sobs as she sits down, "Shimatta."

"I can hear you again, Lucy," Ochiru squeaks, "Am I back to normal? Can I hear my friends now?"

"No," Lucy weeps, "It means we're both messed up. I don't know what's happening, and I have no hope of figuring it out if I can't understand my own herbalist."

"Is it permanent?" the girl asks.

"I don't know," Lucy says, "I don't know anything about it."

The herbalist quietly leaves.

"Lucy," the girl, "What happened to Kutsui? Are we at war?"

"Yes," Lucy explains, "I guess you have no idea what's going on because of this condition."

"What is that big bird you were showing us?" she asks.

"The other kids. They took you from the shelter?" Lucy inquires gently.

"Yes," she says, "Christa promised to help us, and brought us to the gate. I didn't know Satomi could cook like that. I've felt so alone, not being able to hear anyone, and they can't hear me."

"The big bird is a flying machine. I'm giving it to one of my generals, he's going to rescue your friends from Tekiton," Lucy explains, "I know of the horrible things that can happen to them. Also, the army has them building bombs. Things which explode with deadly metal pieces."

"Oh, thank you," Ochiru says, "You'll stay here with me right? We understand each other, so we won't be alone."

"No," Lucy says, pulling her signet stone from her collar, "This makes the bird fly, and I'm the only one who it listens to."

The door opens. Romu appears. He sits down beside Lucy and starts speaking softly to her. Lucy can't understand a word.

"Romu," Lucy says during a pause, "I can't hear you. I'm so sorry."

"He's lying," Ochiru says, "He just wants your stone, see?"

The king is holding out his hand to receive it.

"No," Lucy says, "I still need it." She puts her hand softly on Ochiru's head, "The children of Vendoa still need it."

"He doesn't love you," Ochiru warns.

"That's rediculous," Lucy says, "He's my husband, and the king."

"I can see it in his eyes," Ochiru squeaks, retreating into a corner, "He wants the power, just like the staff at the shelter. He's not like you, run!"

The herbalist gently grabs the child.

Romu wonders why the girl is so scared of him. She's got a condition that makes his words incomprehensible, and even then he hasn't said anything that should scare her even if she could understand.

"Hanash'te!" She screams, "Lushii! Niigete!"

Lucy turns to the girl, her grip tightening on the crystal.

"Lucy, please," Romu says, "You can't make an informed decision if you can't understand my words."

Lucy turns and looks into his eyes. Romu realizes that he has lost her trust. Her eyes accuse, as though she feels personally betrayed. "What's wrong, Lucy? You've never looked at me like that before."

"You want to destroy them, is that it?" Lucy growls, "Kill them _all _if they don't bow to your rule, right? Down to the last child."

Romu is stunned, "My love, can you understand me?"

"Better than you think!" she bellows, "I had to lose my mind to see past your false words." She shoves the herbalist away from Ochiru and picks her up, carrying her into the hall.

"We are betrayed," Romu gasps, "By our own queen."

"Not treachery!" the herbalist urges, "Madness. You can see she still cares. She just doesn't understand-"

"Silence!" Romu orders, "Regardless of whether she's insane or a traitor, that crystal can destroy Laputa!"

"Maybe the core can understand us," Lucy winces, finding a seal on the wall. She throws herself against it, and the wall disappears, opening the door to the drafting room. Pazuu has it running a program to calculate the cross-section of his wing and how it should vary from root to tip.

She taps on an unused panel, "Please, tell us what is happening. Do you have any idea, you silly machine? On the mind of God?"

The panel changes. Laputan is no longer her language, but somehow, it becomes comprehensible to her. The letters are more complex. She gasps, "Iyomeruzo!"

"Language?" Ochiru gasps, "What is that?"

Lucy reads it carefully, "Let us build a city, and a tower to reach to heaven, and make ourselves a name, or we'll be scattered all over the world." She winces, "And God saw ... they were of one language and speech, and have begun to do this. Nothing can stop them, and they can do any evil they imagine."

"No," Ochiru weeps, "That's Vendoa?"

"Let us go down and confound their language," Lucy reads, "So that they can no longer understand each other."

"God hates Vendoa," Ochiru bawls, "I knew it."

"No," Lucy weeps, "That's Laputa. The castle in the sky to reach to heaven. No wonder my ancestors' never-" she grimaces in realization.

Romu bellows just outside the room.

"Can you understand?" Lucy asks.

Ochiru shakes her head.

"Your Majesty, can you hear me?"

"General Tali!" Lucy gasps. She opens a console and sees his face.

"Phew!" he says, "Someone who can understand me, I thought I was losing my marbles."

"It's called Nihongo," Lucy says, "It's our new language. Soon there will be many new languages."

"Oh?" Tali says, "Maybe I should tell you, then. There was a little girl in the third group that no one could understand. It sounded like you were talking like-"

"This one?" Lucy hoists up Ochiru so that he can see.

"I can hear you," she squeaks.

"So it is happening to me," he realizes, "I'm out of touch with Moggai's situation because of this. The Vendoans broke through about three hours ago. I would have thought Romu would have sought the crystal from you by now so he may release the robots."

"Maybe that's what he was telling me," Lucy says, "But I know now. The sin of the Vendoans and the war is his excuse to rule the world by force."

"And you want to rule the world by love?" Tali asks.

"I just want to love," Lucy says, "Ruling the world is just a side-effect."

"The core can bring up a map, I think," General Tali says.

"I'll try," Lucy says, taking the crystal from her neck and waving it over the console, "Oh? Can I get it to show-"

"I see it," he says, "How is it still dry in there? They've blown the dam and flooded the outer court!"

"What?" she gasps.

"Your Majesty," he says, "they seem confused. Maybe this language bug has messed them up, too."

"Probably," Lucy says, "I must destroy the core."

"No," Tali weeps, "We'll never be able to get it back if you do."

Romu is banging on the closed wall, hollering. Little Ochiru retreats between the wall and Lucy, away from the "door".

Lucy takes her crystal and starts reciting the little Laputan she still knows: "The royal courts shall return to the-"

_Oote nabiru toeru ittenaye urusu ba-_

"No," Tali gently urges, "It took us thousands of years to gather that knowledge. Do you want to deprive humanity of that?"

The queen pauses for a moment, then finishes, "-sky."

_-karesitai._

In the lower garden, not far below her, the deep blue main crystal shines brightly. An earthquake starts.

The kids in the shop above her notice, "What's going on?" somebody asks.

Pazuu runs to a window. Buildings seem to be sliding away, collapsing, the entire ground. No, that's not it. "We're lifting off!" he cries, "The whole castle is floating into the sky!"

"Uwah?" Onayi gasps, rushing to the window. Soon all the windows are lined with children and caretakers gasping at the spectacle.

"The children," Lucy gasps. She rushes to the door, hearing nothing on the other side. Romu must have run away, to get on the ground. She opens it.

Romu and two other men jump on her.

"Naniyosuru!" Ochiru screams, jumping on Romu and biting him.

Romu yells at her and sends the little girl into the wall with a sweep of his arm. While the herbalist and one of his bodyguards holds her down, Romu tears the stone from around Lucy's neck and storms off.

[From the movie: "Naniyosuru" appears on its own four times in the movie, (Pazu 37min "How dare you!", Pazu 47min "What are you doing?", Pazu 1:29, "What are you doing?" and Muska 1:50, "How dare you!"); on all these occasions, it expresses a righteous indignation when one perceives an attack (once quite incorrectly, and Muska's sense of "righteous" is warped), so it does seem appropriate under these circumstances. What Lucy reads on the wall is based on Genesis 11:4-7, the story of the tower, overweening pride, and the city of Babel, something that Laputa and Muska's attitude always reminded me of, from early the first time I saw the movie.]


	12. Chapter 12

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 12

"Romu," Lucy bawls, as the two men let go of her, "Laputa deserves to fall. We tried to become God!"

Romu's bodygard spits on her, and the wall closes as the men leave.

"Ochiru," Lucy weeps, "Daizyobu?" Finding her unresponsive, she trembles, gently shaking her, "Ochiru! Otenki des'ka?" "Ochiru!" she cries in anguish.

"If you're falling, why can I still hear you?" General Tali asks over the console channel, "Lucy! Are you alright?"

The wall suddenly opens. Seeing a chance to escape the drafting room, Lucy rushes towards the opening, only to collide with Bishop, who's flying backwards into the little room.

"Romu!" he cries, regaining his feet instantly, screaming in Laputan and pounding on the wall just after it closes.

"Ochiru," Lucy weeps, "You're breathing, at least."

The herbalist pulls her aside and gasps, muttering in Laputan. The only thing that Lucy can tell is that he is right pissed off. He turns to her and starts asking things.

Lucy stands, pointing at the console about the city built to reach heaven. When Bishop touches it, it changes back to Laputan. After reading it, he doesn't say anything. He kneels beside Ochiru and examines her badly injured body.

He pulls a teabag from his pocket and shows it to Lucy.

She nods, then finds Pazuu's lamp and kettle, left in the drafting room. Happily, she finds that the kettle contains only water, and uses the lamp to heat it up.

"General Tali," she says sadly, rubbing the bump on her head, "Can you hear me?"

"What's going on up there?" he gasps.

"Up here?" she sighs, "Where are we?"

"In the sky!" he says.

On the console viewer, Lucy looks up at her own castle, floating from its foundation, dropping tonnes of soil and rock into an extension of Jenwa valley. The bottom is half a sphere, with an angry blue electric glow, as though anxious to cast off the final bonds of Earth, "What have I done?" she gasps.

"Oh," Ochiru moans, "Itai!" She screams as Bishop sets her humerus, "AAAAHH!"

Lucy kneels beside her and explains, "You have a concussion and your left arm is broken."

"Concussion?" she asks.

"What happens when you bang your head really hard."

"That monster," she weeps, "Did he hurt you?"

"Not so bad," Lucy weeps, "but worse in some ways."

"Worse?" she sighs.

"My husband and king almost killed a good friend," Lucy gently strokes the girl's forehead, "It hurts in a way worse than any bump on the head. He's broken my heart."

She stands and faces the console, "General Tali," she explains, "A Vendoan younger with me, her name happens to be the Nihongo word for falling. She defended me when Romu attacked me for the stone, she's badly hurt."

"I know," Tali says, "I was watching the whole thing. Bishop is with you?"

"Yes," she says, "But he doesn't understand Nihongo. Can you get on board?"

"Not a chance," he says, "You're already five hundred feet up and moving south over Jenwa, the Vendoan army's thick there, so even if you could drop vines for us, there's no chance we could reach them."

"No," Lucy weeps as she watches her own castle in the background, "Romu, don't do this."

"What is it?" Tali asks as she scans over the controls, there's nothing she can do to override it without her stolen signet stone.

"Take cover, Tali," she winces as she watches the great electrodes glow orange, "I can't stop it."

"Can't stop _what?_" the General asks.

"Our main weapon," she cries, "Romu's firing on the Vendoans behind you!" She manages to control her wardens, keeping Romu from launching the deadly flying robots, "Maybe taking off wasn't such a good idea."

An orange fireball flies from her castle's hemispherical base, delivering a heavenly blast matched only by large meteors. Another, and another. Thousands of Vendoans must be dying with each, and probably Laputan soldiers mixed in with them. "Romu!" she screams in anguish, watching the blast waves sweep over General Tali's forces until she loses her connection, "my love." She melts to her knees, bawling.

"Something's wrong," Pazuu says as he pulls himself away from the window, "_Really_ wrong." He sees Onayi, gently turns him by his shoulders to face him and asks, "Do you have any idea where Lucy is?"

"Hablo Español?" Onayi responds.

"Uh, Nihongo," Pazuu gasps, "What's going on?"

Chobasi is tugging on Onayi's sleeve, bawling; Pazuu can't make out a single word. Clearly, neither can Onayi.

He finds the engineer, "Hey, Boss!" As the bridge engineer turns to face him, Pazuu has his hand over his mouth.

Oyagata scrambles through the crowd of panicking kids and adults to meet up with the teenager, "Pazuu, Daizyobu?"

Pazuu is filled with relief, "We both got Lucy's language. We need to find her."

Christa has a collection of confused youngers. She isn't even trying to speak.

"She had taken Falling to Bishop, the herbalist," Oyagata explains, "It isn't very likely he's going to be able to do anything about it."

"Could it be something like the flu?" Pazuu asks.

"No," Oyagata says, "Not like this, not affecting so many people at once. Whatever it is, Lucy was the first to catch it, so she's the most likely to know what it is."

"There's something we need to do first," Pazuu says. He stands on Lucy's little washbasin. "Oy! Oy!" Once he has everyone's attention, he descends from the washbasin and lifts it up.

Only a few people understand what he's saying. He explains in his own language what he's trying to show them. Oyagata holds the washbasin, while he spreads his arms, apparently indicating the mess hall and all the people in it, then spreads his fingers and taps on the bottom of the upside-down washbasin. He takes one of his small model birds from his pocket and sets it on the washbasin, then starts sounding really desperate in his speech. He crouches and pats on the floor, as though he misses it dearly.

"How are we going to get home?" Onayi asks.

Pazuu seems to understand his question somehow. He taps the little bird from the washbasin and it glides gently to the floor. After it stops, he stands up the fallen easel with the picture of his plane. He then picks up the little bird and taps on the picture with it.

"There must be at least a few of you who understand my words and can be the example," Pazuu walks over to Hotana and grabs his shoulder. It is painfully obvious that Hotana is not one of them, "He will show you how to make the craft's parts in the shop. Follow him, okay?"

Chobasi happened to have brought a drawing with him. He walks up to Hotana and shows it to him. They have a short conversation; it is clear they got the same language.

Hotana looks at Pazuu with sorrow and gratitude in his eyes, and starts to speak slowly.

After a few words, Pazuu interrupts gently, "Gomennasai, wakarimasen."

"Sheshemi," Hotana finishes with a pat on Pazuu's shoulder. It sounded like it might have been an apology for his "wagon boy" comment back when they could understand each other.

Hotana then addresses the crowd. Several of the children raise their hands. One with his hand already up grabs the arm of one next to him as he seems to follow suit, in order to hold it down. Hotana says a few more words, and all the kids with their hands raised, plus two adults, wave their hands. A few more words, and they all rise and follow him back to the shop, urging those around them to do the same.

"Maybe we will get this thing built after all," Oyagata says, "Pazuu, get to the drafting room, that program you set going should be done by now, assuming whatever is making the castle fly hasn't crashed it."

"Do you know where we're going?" Pazuu asks.

"We're just riding the wind," he says, "And you're more likely to find out where it's taking us from the drafting room than the mess hall. Get going."

[From the movie: Muska 42min: "Fearsome powers thrust Laputa into orbit. Their dreaded empire once ruled the earth!" "Sheshemi" is "Thank you" in Mandarin Chinese; I identified it from "Chinese 2" of the movie (1:11, when Sheeta thanks Harry (guessing his name) for his offer to help her in the kitchen), and the primary track of _Fearless,_ starring Jet Li as Huo Yuanjia, an early 1900s Chinese hero (the primary track features some English, which the subtitles don't quote exactly, and Japanese.)]


	13. Chapter 13

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 13

Pazuu races around the corner to the drafting room, but as he arrives, sees a huge robot. It turns towards him, and after a moment, feels a heat on his chest as its laser eye begins to glow. He jumps out of the way and suddenly feels heat all around him, the wall along the outside of the corner is suddenly yellow-hot. He retreats.

"Where is Lucy?" he cries from behind cover, "Are you protecting her?"

He hears the robot beep.

Pazuu timidly peeks around the corner. The somber looking robot stares suspiciously back at him.

"Please," Pazuu starts, "I'm trying to find Her Majesty, Queen Lucita."

The robot beeps again.

"You're not going to burn me up?" Pazuu asks.

The robot does not respond. His eyes track Pazuu as he breaks from cover. He is very uncomfortable as the heat radiates from the wall beside him. Pazuu moves very slowly, keeping his empty hands visible, "Please, I'm here to help Lucy rescue the children from Tekiton."

The robot keeps his eyes on Pazuu while it turns its body towards the inner wall. The emblem on its breastplate glows briefly.

"Pazuu!" he hears Lucy's faint voice on the other side of the wall, "I'm trapped! Romu's taken my crystal, and Falling is badly hurt."

"Falling?" Pazuu searches, _Ochiru, the girl!_

There is another voice, whose speech he doesn't understand.

"Lucy!" he calls, "Are you prisoner?"

"Yes!" she yells back, "But, Bishop, the herbalist is prisoner with me. He doesn't have Nihongo, but there are no guards. How did you open a console channel! I can see you."

"There's a robot out here," he says, "I think he's protecting you ... he took a shot at me."

"My gardener?" Lucy squeaks

Pazuu looks at the robot's biggest eye, "Can you open the door, please?" he softly asks.

The wall opens.

"Oh, my kingdom," she weeps as she embraces Pazuu, "where my robots are more loyal than my husband." She parts him to a few inches, "How are the children? Are they working on the flying machine yet?"

"Yes," Pazuu says, "The castle is flying, and we're trapped up here, we don't know where we are. We're going to need it just to get to the ground."

"Your wing program is done," Lucy sniffles, "Let's print these off and get these to the shop. God has scrambled everyone's language."

"God?" Pazuu asks, "and what's a language?"

"A way of speaking," she says, "Like Nihongo and Laputan. Bishop has a different language than we do."

"God?" Pazuu asks, "_Vendoa_ deserves such treatment, not Laputa. Why would He do such a thing to us."

"Because we tried to replace Him," Lucy weeps, "We tried to become God, and our judging Vendoa for her sins as if we were gods pissed Him off ... and building a castle that could fly."

Bishop taps Lucy on the shoulder during this moment of silence, pointing out that Ochiru, sitting in the corner, is patched up, her arm in a sling and sipping the tea with her other hand. She obviously hates the taste of it.

"Thank you," Lucy says to the herbalist with a grateful nod.

"Nazda rovia," he answers. Pazuu can't understand his reply, but he imagines that it was probably "You're welcome," or "My pleasure" in his language.

"We need to get that crystal the monster stole," Ochiru squeaks as she tries to stand.

"Stay here," she says, "the robot will guard you." Turning to the robot, she says, "Deshou?"

The robot beeps happily.

"Thank you," Lucy says.

"Your Majesty?" General Tali says from the console.

"Yes, General?" she says, "Are you alright?"

"Yes, but Moggai is dead and half of his forces were taken out when the castle fired upon the Vendoan forces in Jenwa. Jenwa is in ruins, the river drained into the hole left when the castle lifted off, leaving a huge canyon, and there are craters all over the place. I can see the glow of the raw kuuseki, and that stuff is ruined by air. We'll never be able to refine it again at this rate."

"Oh, no," Lucy weeps.

"Surely that thing can tell friend from foe," he growls, "I've seen your robot playing with the pigeons, the castle's lightning catapult should be at least half as smart. It should be telling Romu that he's hurting friendlies, too!"

"I don't think he cares anymore," Lucy cries, "You saw what he did to that little girl."

"Ochiru-chan" he says, "Is she going to make it?"

"I think so," Lucy says, "Brief her for me, please."

"Wait!" he cries as she departs, "Where are you going?"

"To get my crystal back!"

Only a few minutes later, she finds Romu at the black console in the lower garden, the only location from which the main weapon may be controlled.

"Romu," she says, "This must end, my love. You've killed our own people." She pauses long enough that his name should be distinguishable no matter what language he now understands. "Moggai ... You killed him, Romu. ... You killed your most faithful officer."

He launches into some sort of histrionic tirade. She can't understand a word, but hears Moggai's name in a way that makes it obvious that he didn't put a whole lot of value on his life.

"After he knows where you are," she says, looking directly at Romu, "You must not let him touch the console. On three... ichi ... ni-"

Romu reacts to a rustle behind him, turning. That's when Pazuu leaps upon Romu, clawing at his face and kicking him where it hurts the most. Just as he throws off the teenager, Lucy reaches him and grabs his right hand as he reaches for the console. She smashes it between the console and her head, then pries the crystal out of his hand. She runs towards the exit as Romu collapses, Pazuu having taken a different route.

Romu crawls for a couple of paces, in quite a bit of pain from Pazuu's attack. He rests for about a minute before getting up. Her trail is easy to follow since the lift-off settled dust all over the infrequently visited lower levels of the castle.

He finds her. "Lucy, you've lost your mind," he says, "and betrayed _our_ people. Hundreds of our soldiers, including General Moggai, are _dead_ because _you_ locked down the robots and forced me to use the main cannon."

She's cowering against a wall at the end of a corridor, an apparent dead end, "Onegai shimasu," she quivers.

"The crystal won't even defend you anymore, Lucy," Romu gloats, "It's useless to you, now. Give it back, Lucy."

"Onegai!" she screams, flailing at him to persuade him to keep his distance.

"You _asked_ for it, Lucy!" he growls, then charges her.

"Hiraite!" she screams, ducking out of the way.

Romu braces for the impact against the wall, but knows Lucy is cornered. She's not going to get away this time.

Suddenly he sees blue. The wall did _not_ stop his charge. Neither does he feel the floor as he stumbles. Below him, he sees cratered Jenwa and its empty river, just like he did through the console veiwer. He's no longer on the castle. "AAAAAHHHH!"

Lucy looks out the opened door at the end of the corridor. She knew it led to open sky before she reached it, since it was normally a continuous corridor, the door formed for safety reasons as part of the castle fell away. "I'm sorry, my love," she says, hearing the falling king's fading scream. She stands there for several minutes, losing sight of Romu before he reaches the blackened ruins of Jenwa far below.

"Uwah!" Pazuu gasps as he gets there, "I take it he's abdicated his throne?"

Lucy nods, "I suppose you could say that." She opens her hand to reveal the glowing control stone, "We got what we came for, let's head back upstairs."

[From the movie: It is clear that the main weapons and defenses of Laputa are very advanced, and there is canon evidence of a sci-fi grade deflector shield in operation when _Goliath_ fires her main batteries at 1:48-9, or there needs to be some explanation as to how Pazuu survives on the main cannon's exterior while _Goliath_ fires directly upon him. In any case, it looks like Laputa could take on a Star Destroyer or the _Enterprise!_ At 1:50, Sheeta opens a door with "Onegai ... Hiraite", so apparently the castle systems actually do understand Japanese (oh, by the way, Nihongo is Japanese for Japanese.) The reason I had Lucy able to lock down the robots is because from 58min to 1:02, and later at 1:28 to 1:34, they show Sheeta an _awful_ lot of respect when she doesn't have the crystal. Also, at 1:49, the offensive force deployment chutes appear to be full for Muska, which means that Romu couldn't have expended any. "Nazda rovia" is Russian for "To your health", their equivalent for "You're welcome", and very appropriate considering the circumstances. For those whose Russian is much stronger than mine, my apologies if I rendered it badly; my Russian is _far_ weaker than my Japanese.

Now, it is time to blow the top on Jenwa: There is a circular lake feeding a river in the closing credits, making it a _very_ good candidate for Laputa's earthbound foundation. I only realized this after writing this chapter. In the movie, Jenwa valley is where Pazuu lives, and several craters are visible in the area. For _some_ reason, Pazuu's home and most of those surrounding it are in ruins. In the movie, the terrain around Pazuu's home from 1:05 to 1:06 really does look like it was marked by Laputa's main weapon: I counted fifteen craters, including Oyagata's mine. Now that I've written how this came about, it is very hard for me to watch that part of the movie without getting my cheeks wet.]


	14. Chapter 14

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 14A

Onayi hacks at one of the plane's rough hewn plywood parts with a pick, digging out the web. On the piece's long edges, glue has oozed out between the small pieces of wood and dried clear, looking almost like little blisters.

"Okawari?" Satomi gently says as she sets a plate from her meal cart on the small table beside him.

"Gracious, señora," he nods to her.

They stare at each other for a minute, each of them with silent tears. Two best friends who can't understand a word of the other any more.

"Gomennasai," she says at last, and walks away, pushing her meal cart.

He takes a few bites, then covers it with his hankerchief to finish the piece he's working on before handing it off to Chobasi to finish by sanding. Each piece he gets is smaller than the previous. "At least I'm well fed," he says.

Hotana is showing three of the children how to make paint. The three kids speak the same language, but not the same as Hotana. The result is that Hotana doesn't say much, while the children discuss the work animatedly with each other.

"Oh, the color scheme he has in mind," Pazuu hands Oyagata one of his birds, painted blue on the underside and mottled brown on top, "He wants us to be harder to spot, I guess."

"I can't blame him," Oyagata says, "He's probably figured out that we're over Vendoa. And if a plane departed from the flying castle that killed my son and landed next to my house, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't give those aboard enough time to explain, let alone that they'd almost certainly be speaking a different language."

"If you were Vendoan and had a son," Pazuu says, "You probably wouldn't even know it. They're like that; it's why I left."

"When I get home, will my wife understand me? Little Madge," he weeps, "They might not even understand each other. That would be terrible, she's only three."

"Look on the bright side," Pazuu says, "Madge will grow up knowing both languages, right?"

"Your Majesty," says General Tali through the console, from his tattered uniform, half of which appears to have been scalped from a Vendoan sargeant, "Everyone, both Jenwan and Vendoan, is trying to kill anyone in a Laputan uniform.

"That explains the bizarre outfit on your back," Lucy sighs. Her own pink gown has seen better days.

"I have two hundred, thirty-seven loyal men left," Tali says sadly, "including twelve Vendoan defectors who know Nihongo, and thirty Laputans who don't."

"There are a hundred, sixty-three people left up here," Lucy says, "There are at least seven different languages, but we've all managed to unite on building the plane, communicating through drawings and numbers. We've agreed on, er," she looks for a way of describing it, "kind of a _loopy_ set of characters for the numbers. Zero to nine here," she taps a couple spots on the console, changing the view for both ends of the call:

_0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9_

"They're neither Laputan nor Nihongo. Funny, both the _nazohoyai_ and _shesheme_ understand Nihongo numbers," she giggles, "but everyone seems to be picking these up the fastest." She types in, "so these are the numbers we've spoken just now:"

_237 12 30 163 7_

"Cool," he says, "I'm glad to hear you guys are getting along up there, 'cus it's a _major _mess down here. Oh, and you might want to know, you're gaining altitude, now up at several thousand feet, I hope you don't get mountain sickness."

"I'm scared to try the main controls," Lucy says, "I can't read the black console in the lower garden, that's the helm, but also the main weapon controls. I don't want to fire the cannon by accident."

"Then you're _completely _adrift," Tali says, confirming what she already knows.

"The behaviour of the castle is predictable, at least," she says, "I've figured out how to read our exact position and altitude. We are at 5270 feet, and I'll show you our position on the map."

It appears on the viewer.

"Day three of our flight," Lucy sighs, "For a million ton castle, we are making good time."

"How's the big tree handling it?" Tali asks.

"Happy as pie!" Lucy says.

_3.141259..._

They laugh as the console displays the number to over a thousand places.

Lucy sighs again, then says, "I don't know if it's because we're paying for our crimes against God or if it's because Romu threw himself off. Or maybe it's because it's sunny. I don't know that thing as well as I let on."

"Well, I'll let you get back to work," Tali says, "There's a mob hitting us."

Lucy calls up the map again, "Head to this position in Jenwa," she instructs, "Some calculations Pazuu has run show that it will be the most fertile area near you once it starts growing again after recovering from the cannon damage."

"Have you given up on the Tekiton children?" Tali asks.

"No," Lucy says, "but the plane will move quite fast. Pazuu is training on a core console nearby. Let me see if I can bring it up."

It shows a perspective of Vendoa, near Tekiton. The craft is flying at a minimum of twice a horse's gallop.

"Uwah!" Tali gasps, seeing that it is actually flying at about four times a horse's gallop, a speed the display calls "54.7m/s". It pulls up, and the speed indicator goes down, while the altitude indicator starts increasing. "Is he actually _flying_ it, I thought you said it wasn't going to be ready for another three days!"

"It's a simulation," Lucy says, "Something only our core can do. I'm amazed at how he's been able to program it. Even the Boss is jealous."

"And he can't change the castle's course either?" Tali asks.

"The helm only responds to the one who has the crystal," Lucy says, "and he's scared of firing the main cannon, too."

Back in the shop, the kids, on a short scaffold under the wing, slide a ventral skin panel into place under the wing. Oyagata and Hotana are installing wicker seats with webbing seatbelts in the hull. Their feet are held in the floor with a "dovetail" and block, making it hard for natural forces to get the seat out of the floor, but relatively easy for a person to remove when he actually wants to.

The wheels of a cart squeak.

"A little early for supper, Satomi," Oyagata says before he realizes that her cart is loaded up with the latest part from Chobasi's finishing bench, a stack of star-shaped dowels, two buckets of glue, three of paint, and a roll of drawings from downstirs.

She giggles, "I thought you might say that." Her face and tone sober quickly as she says, "We have enough food to last only two weeks, water for one, and for obvious reasons, we aren't expecting any deliveries."

"Three days," Oyagata says, "especially if you're helping. Thank you. And there is _lots_ of water in the outer courts, you just need to filter and boil it first."

"Shesheme," Hotana says to her, making her blush. He then turns to the seven kids on his assembly crew behind him and starts issuing instructions. The cart is soon almost empty.

"We're using the dowels for internal fixtures," he explains to the three children who understand him.

"Any way I can help?" Satomi offers.

"Oh?" Oyagata says.

"I have some spare time," she says.

"You're small enough to fit between the spars in the wing," he says, "So yes, you can put these dowels into the left wing," he starts to show her on one of the fuselage ribs. Soon she is climbing into the wing, wearing pants and a short sleeve shirt, with a bag rope tugging a small jug of glue and bag of dowels.

"Do well," Oyagata instructs, "Your life and those of all your friends depends on it, and I can't fit in there to check your work."

"I need a lamp," she says, "It's too dark in here."

Oyagata realizes that they are all in use, "Oh, no, I don't have one."

"I do," Lucy says softly, having somehow snuck up on him.

She holds her control stone in her hand, "Be gentle," she says to it in Nihongo, and then recites the Laputan spell: "_Ratobarita urusu ariarosu baru netorirru._"

The stone lights up softly.

"I need it back, Satomi," she says as she tosses it into the wing after the girl.

"Oh thank you, Your Majesty," Satomi says from inside the wing.

[From the movie: I verified that number kanji are the same on all three Chinese subtitle tracks; the Japanese subtitles always use the Arabic "loopy" numerals, but I know from elsewhere that Japanese uses the same kanji numbers, and I can read them. "Nazohoyai" and "Shesheme" are "Thank you" in the "Chinese 1" (Cantonese) and "Chinese 2" (Mandarin) audio tracks (at 1:11, where Sheeta thanks Harry for his offer to help in the kitchen. "Chinese 2" matches at 1:33, where Sheeta thanks the current gardener for the flowers; "Chinese 1" does not dub that line.) The "dovetail" was inspired by the fact that they don't have nails, and is a common way turbine and compressor blades are secured to the rotor disks of jet engines in real life.]


	15. Chapter 15

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 15

"Thank you," Pazuu says to the robot.

It beeps happily, and then, to the amazement of Oyagata and Hotana, the small red lights in its nose, erupt with a red scanning beam, carefully inspecting the top of the wing. Pazuu is holding a stone cube. Watching the results come back, he smiles. The robot even lies down on its back to scan the wing's underside, it also carefully scans the fuselage.

"I'll go for one more run in the simulator, just to be sure," Pazuu says.

"Have some cake first," Satomi instructs cheerfully.

"So?" Oyagata says.

"At dawn's first light," Pazuu says with a smile after his first bite.

In the simulator, which he has equipped with a set of controls identical to that in the real plane, he learns that the aircraft's behaviour in flight will indeed be very close to his design. He tells it to shift some mass around to see how that affects it, and clearly, if there is too much in the back, they will die. He then tells the computer to blow some holes in the wings and waits several minutes while it does the calculations. If the simulator can be trusted to predict the aircraft's behaviour, he is very confident that it will fly as he intends. Then he gets some sleep.

Once everyone is aboard the huge craft the next morning, he takes the controls. He goes over his checklist a second time, then turns to Lucy, at the other set of controls to his right, "Are you ready, Your Majesty?" She nods, gently holds the crystal around her neck, and slowly recites: "_Rite ratobarita hureite karione ariarosu karesitai._"

The craft smoothly lifts straight off, pitching up quickly, but not violently. Looking around, Pazuu says, "That should be enough ma'am, can you turn it off please?"

She nods, and the crystal goes dark. The craft picks up speed as it descends.

"Magnificent," Lucy sighs.

Pazuu puts the ship into a right bank, turning gently about, "She is responding well," Pazuu says, "Turn that crank clockwise a bit, please," he instructs.

"Right roll trim," she says, turning it, "Is this enough?"

"You've been trying out the simulator too?" Pazuu asks.

"Couldn't help it," she says, "It looked so easy."

"How many times did you crash before you got the hang of it?"

"Only four times," she blushes.

"Seventeen for me," he laughs, "but then again, I was adjusting the design, too. Keep an eye out for Tali's signal fire, It was rather tough to spot in the simulator."

She finds it as they approach his position.

"Low at high key," he says as he flies over their heads, "hang on!"

He pulls the ship into a hard left bank, a tight turn for his final circle. As he levels off, he announces, "Final approach!" He pulls up into a perfect flare, bringing the bottom of the hull just three feet off the sod-specked mud blown about by one of Romu's blasts.

"Brace for landing stall!" he yells as the nose climbs, "Right about _now!_" He feels the slight pitch as the flow separates from the wing, and then lets go of the controls to brace against the dashboard. In a few seconds, the craft is stopped.

"You alright?" Lucy asks.

"Of course!" Pazuu cheers, "I didn't even hit my head."

The children and surrogate parents rapidly disembark the craft, and Tali's men climb aboard, with a collection of grenades made according to Pazuu's instructions given through the console earlier.

"Glad to finally meet you in person," Tali cheers as he ties himself into a seat just behind Pazuu.

Once aloft, Pazuu controls the craft quite easily.

"So, there's no one left on Laputa?" Tali asks.

"No one," Lucy says, "but I must return."

"Why?" Pazuu asks.

"I started on a memorial, that I was going to lay in front of the tree, telling the story of how Laputa the castle rose, and how Laputa the kingdom fell," she says, "I need to finish it. It'll be in the old language, which we'll probably relearn before we can return there without this crystal. No other engine exists which can lift this bird, or any other, right?"

Pazuu nods.

"Did," Lucy hesistates to ask, "you ever have a girlfriend?"

"No," Pazuu says, "Some took an interest as my strength built up under the wagon builder in my village," he explains, "but it could never work. I don't want to marry someone who'd ever care that I used to be Vendoan. I only ever told one girl, and I got a drink thrown in my face for it."

"Oh," she says. Perking up, she reports, "I can see Castle Tekiton. Oh, no, they see us, their bowmen are on the wall."

"Climb, Your Majesty," Tali instructs, putting a streamer on his grenade and replacing the fuze with a small bronze device, "We can drop these on them from the ship so that we can clear us a landing spot."

She recites her spell and gives the ship several hundred more feet of altitude before turning it off.

"We can't see forward," Tali says, "Pazuu, tell us when to drop them out the windows."

"High key," he says, "in about twenty seconds, be ready. I'll be pulling a hard left turn about five seconds after I say."

"When?" Tali asks.

"_Now!_" he yells, staring out through the growing collection of arrows sticking out of the wooden plane's nose.

The resulting collection of blasts clear the landing field, and during the final turn, Tali's men take up bows and let fly arrows out the window. After the typical rough landing, Lucy unlatches and kicks away her hingeless plug door and leaps from the cockpit, leading a squad of Tali's men to the armory entrance.

Once inside, word spreads quickly among the kids as Tali's skilled men cut down the guards, several of which surrender.

Lucy examines an eight year old boy at a workbench, scrawny and malnourished. After wiping the charcoal from the child's cheek, and seeing the tearful eyes, she realizes that the child is actually a girl, one who obviously doesn't have Nihongo. She understands the words of another bawling child.

"We haven't eaten since the war began," he cries, "They won't give us anything to eat, and only cloudy water to drink, but make us build these things that blow us up. And we can't understand each other. Help us."

Rushing to him, Lucy urges, "I don't understand everyone, but you I do. Tell me everything."

"The last kid was twelve, Nikoyan," he sobs, "He was blown to pieces," the boy points out a brown stain on his filthy workbench, "this is all that's left of him, now. They burned his pieces."

Tali vomits at the news, forming a small clear puddle on the floor, since he hasn't eaten anything recently. "How many are left of you?"

"K-k-k-kyu hyaku," the kid sobs.

"Nine hundred?" Lucy gasps, "That's _impossible!_ Where are you from?"

He names a plush Tekiton suburb, then explains, "They took my parents to Jenwa," he explains, "and brought me here. Most of the kids at the time said they were from Kutsui or Minoa. Five days, they were just rounding up all the children around Vendoa and telling us to make these," he points nervously at a Vendoan round grenade, "Last week they told me that the Laputan castle flew out of its foundation and blew my parents to bits, and while he was talking to me, it turned to jibberish. I couldn't understand a word after he told me my parents were dead. But I saw the flying castle-"

"We're going to get you out of this awful place," Lucy promises, "and find you some new parents. It might be a couple days though."

The kid turns carefully back to his work, taking a powder flask and holding it over the hollow cast iron shell of the bomb he pointed at.

"No!" Lucy says, grabbing it from his hand, "Don't make any more of these. If we need any more, the General's men will make them. This is _not _something you children should be doing!"

"What else can we do?" he asks.

"Play ball, fly kites," she says with a smile, "learn a new language, now that there are so many." He picks him up and carries him to a window. She unlatches the shutter (only the windows of the Laputan capital are glazed) and points at the aircraft, "A hundred and one kids fled to Laputa and built that in the flying castle. All of them are alive, and ate two full meals a day while doing it. All of them have round cheeks, big enough to grab like mine," she says, putting his hand on her cheek.

He smiles, pinching the flesh of her cheek gently.

"I have to let you go, for now," she says. After putting him down, she marches smartly to General Tali.

"We are doing very well, Your Majesty," he reports, "Pazuu and three of my men should be on their way back from an armory between their walls to stock up on our grenades. The smallest little girl wanted to show them where eight of her friends were blown to little pieces," he breaks down in tears, "She had her brother's thumb in her pocket."

"I found myself wishing we'd brought Christa," Lucy says, "These kids haven't eaten in two weeks, see if you can find them something. I'm not having another morsel until all of them have had a meal."

[From the movie: A large window through which Sheeta and Pazuu observe the General and his men looting treasure has glass in its frame, the edges of a broken pane.]


	16. Chapter 16

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 16

General Tali rapidly sets up a command post just inside the entrance to the workshop, deciding against stopping the children from drawing the fires. Lucy helps him unfold the tables and chairs he brought along. A man runs up to him, pulls out a notepad and writes a number on it, circling it twice.

"Arigatoo," the General says, patting his shoulder twice. He turns to Lucy and explains, "The kitchen is secure, ma'am."

"He speaks Nihongo?" she asks.

"No," he says, "We came up with a system using those numbers you showed us. We've numbered each of these buildings and rooms. A pity we don't have time to brief you."

"Yeah," she says, "Secure the two hundred smallest children in the aircraft. _Smallest,_ not youngest," she emphasizes, "We'll come back with a staff for the kitchen."

Pazuu returns, exhausted from running with a six year old child on his back while pushing a cart. "Some resistance on the way back," he reports. There is blood on the hilt of his knife in its scabbard and a gash on his left arm. "I'll be fine," he says as he lowers the nervous boy. Lucy is approaching.

"Not if you keep bleeding like that," Lucy says, "The body only has so much. It'll take me thirty seconds to patch it. Hold still for just that long, please."

"What is this?" he asks of the powder on the rag she tied his arm with.

"Chitosan," Tali says, "It doesn't hurt, and'll patch up any wound in just a few seconds, even that one." He points out a prisoner, who's missing his leg from just above the knee.

"War sucks," Pazuu says, "Anyway, I want to go back to Jenwa, come here, and go back again before dark. Maybe I can do one more trip before dusk."

"Pazuu, can't you fly at night?" Lucy asks.

"No," he says, "I could in the simulator, but because it had instruments that I couldn't build in time. Fog or clouds would leave us in even worse trouble, we'd need to fly over them until they clear. It would almost certainly give us mountain sickness."

Tali is plotting things on his table. He's so much quieter than Lucy's used to seeing when he does a training exercise on the castle grounds, a man who has adapted surprisingly well to the circumstances. He doesn't seem confused at all.

"How's your intel?" Lucy asks politely.

"Not as good as I'm used to, but good enough," he says, "The enemy is obviously quite messed up in that regard. Three full strength spearmen battalions wait three clicks to the west, and could wipe us out by lunch. They haven't got the faintest idea we're even here."

"You're helping with that, I hope," Lucy says.

"Of course," Tali says, "but that's more of a side-effect than a goal."

"Really?" Lucy asks.

"Horses are edible," he points out. Then, seemingly out of the blue, he says, "Your Majesty, the aircraft is five minutes from ready, you better get going."

"Huh? How did you-?" she gasps.

"Leutenant Ash just semaphored me," he points at a man at the plane's tail, "He speaks _Merci._"

"Oh," she says, "Well, we should be back in three hours. About one in the afternoon."

"Merci," she courtseys to the leutenant as she boards the aircraft.

He blushes.

"Pazuu, we're almost buttoned up for take-off," she says as he checks his controls and adjusts his altimeter, "How's the bird doing?"

"They messed up the paint," he grumbles as he yanks an arrow from the ceiling, "Tyrnea put a lot of work into this paint job." The arrow had entered through the unglazed front windows.

At this moment, Oyagata reports from the seat behind Pazuu, "Ready to go!"

Lucy takes off the aircraft, and after a few seconds of nervous quivering, the two hundred kids in the back start cheering. One of the stick's seems to quiver in Pazuu's hands.

"We took something in the left elevator, Boss," he says, can you see what it is? "Better climb us to at least five thousand above the ground, Ma'am. She's tough, but not invincible." As he works the controls, he mumbles, "What the heck is _with_ this thing?" Turning to Lucy, he orders, "Left roll trim, _lots_ of it."

She cranks the appropriate wheel, reporting, "This wheel is turning much more easily than before, what did you do?"

"We must have lost the rope to the left trim tab," he says, "Boss?"

"Try a fifteen foot ballista bolt near the aileron root about a third of the way out," he gasps, pulling himself through the roof to see the wing's dorsal side. When he comes back he reports, "Make that _sixteen _feet, I can see it sticking through the top side."

"Eei, konokanseshiirateko," he grumbles, "Lucy, can you fly this for a few minutes?"

"What?" she squeaks, "Someone has to get that javelin out of the wing, or it'll jam when we land, probably take the aileron right off."

"Are you out of your mind!" she cries, "You're going _out_ there?"

"On the dorsal surface of the wing," Pazuu explains, "to hammer the tip down through and clear."

"Let me do that!" Oyagata answers.

"How much do you weigh?" Pazuu asks, "Nothing personal."

"About two-ten," he says, "Don't worry, that ain't anywhere _near_ enough to break that wing, nor this rope."

"Ah!" Pazuu laughs, "Of _course,_ that's not what I'm worried about. I just want to make sure we don't wind up in a spin."

"Did you want me to fix that trim tab as well?" Oyagata wonders.

"Not a chance," Pazuu answers, "There's only one person with both the size and ability to pull _that _off in flight."

After leveling off and pulling the craft to its minimum speed, Oyagata starts on his way.

"Oh, Boss?" Pazuu says, "If the wind on your face suddenly drops while you're out there, hang on _real_ tight."

"The stall," Lucy groans.

"We're lighter than on the first trip," Pazuu says, "We'll be fine."

And they were, the Boss hammered the iron javelin through without incident, and even managed to keep his hammer when the bolt suddenly popped loose. Pazuu landed the ship perfectly, and in just a few seconds, Satomi runs after the plane crying, "My _wing!_ My _wing!_ Oh, you poor thing!" She races aboard the ship and finds Pazuu, "What happened to my wing?"

"Oh?" Pazuu says, "I was hoping to find you. They shot us with a ballista on the way up. The Boss here hammered the javelin out, but we lost the rope for the trim tab on the aileron. Would you like to fix it?"

"Get me in there!" she cries, unlatching the access panel, "You poor thing!"

"Don't forget this," Lucy says, handing her the glowing crystal as Oyagata helps her into the cabin's ceiling.

Satomi is so anxious to fix the rope that she has it finished before the bird's even loaded, "Try it now!" she calls back. As Pazuu tries the trim wheel, she says, "Ooh, that tickles."

"Take a loop off the slack reel, please," he asks Lucy as Satomi crawls backwards out of the wing, "Tag along if you like, Satomi. I must warn you that it is a war zone, but they do need a good cook."

Christa tries to pull her from the plane.

"Please?" Lucy says, embracing one of the dusty, scrawny girls, who was so weak she needed help to disembark.

"Otaya!" Satomi squeaks as she recognizes her.

"Sa-" the girl looks about until she finds her, "Satomi!" She asks something.

"We don't speak the same language anymore," Satomi explains, "I'm so sorry. Christa," she points, "she's here."

"Christa," Otaya says softly, "Shesheme." At that moment she pauses, then she starts bawling. It is soon apparent why: she just lost one of her adult teeth.

"Ma'am," Pazuu pops his head out of the door of the aircraft, "We lost too much time for the aileron during the flight, this'll have to be the last trip of the day. Let's get packing."

Lucy carries the poor girl into Tali's camp.

"I'm Major Urisa," a man introduces himself, "I used to command the Vendoan Royal Grenadier's Battalion, and the most senior officer other than the General himself who knows Nihongo. He's put me in charge of the shelter arrangements for the children. I hope you can tell me, Your Majesty," he seems rather shy, "How many more are there?"

"Seven hundred, roughly," she says.

"Also, my apologies about last week," he says sheepishly.

"Huh?" she wonders, "What about last week?"

"It was my unit that chased after you from the customs fort."

"Oh," Lucy says, then smiles, "Nothing personal, right? A strategic initiative that'll be on our side from now on."

"Yes, ma'am," he snaps to attention and salutes.

"Thank you," she answers with a slight bow.

[From the movie: "Great, just what we need", Dola's reaction at 1:23 just before _Goliath_ opens fire on the _Tiger Moth_. "I'm _not_ okay: the galleon's wrecked, my baby! Boo hoo!" A more accurate translation of Dola's husband's line at 2:00; the actual subtitle is "Oh no! My galleon's wrecked...", but "kawaii", the Japanese word for "cute" is plain as day in both the audio and Japanese subtitles! "This is Leutenant Ash on Terran Patrol, Wing Gamma. Taken heavy damage." Oops, that's _Descent: Freespace_ by Interplay/Volition 1998 (opening cinematic.) "Merci" is French for "Thank You". Yes, I'm naming languages after their expressions of gratitude; this is, incidentally, why Laputa is sorting itself out so much better than Vendoa. No records exist of whether this was a factor in the real events around 2243BC (i.e.: Babel), so this story probably sheds more light on that event than the field of archaeology ever will (not to mention that archaeological/paleontological evidence is so heavily filtered to protect the current leading theories that much of it is rejected out of hand; look up the book _Forbidden Archaeology_ to see what you're missing. The main author subscribes to Indian Vedic/Hindu theories, including a billions-of-years timeline about as far from the Bible as you can get (excepting possibly the likes of Nietzche and Hitler), so don't think I'm trying _too_ hard to pitch a Judeo-Christian worldview. Oh, the guys who busted up Lt. Ash in _Freespace_ are called _Shivans_ after the Hindu destroyer god; your typical Judeo-Christian would never bother to look that up.) Chitosan is a twenty-first century discovery: ground up shrimp shells will clot almost any blood almost instantly, including that of hemophiliacs; it's the sort of thing that Laputan descendants would probably take a long time to forget. Thanks for reading _Shattered Elegance_, by the way.]


	17. Chapter 17

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 17

"Lift," Pazuu orders, "They're smart, they've set up mangonels with grenades, probably fuzed to go off in the air, downwind of the armory courtyard."

Lucy's crystal glows and the craft climbs again, after a few hundred feet, Lucy turns it off and the craft descends back into the glide. "How do you want to bring her in?" she asks.

"Out of the east," he says, "It's too tight to come in from the south out of the wind, and the courtyard is a bit wider this way,"

"Except for the castle's tower right in our way," she points out, "Why not out of the west?"

"We can't fight off those four thousand spearmen Tali said were off in that direction," Pazuu says, "If they figure out where we're landing, we're screwed."

"Asoko!" Lucy cries in alarm, "There's a ballista in that tower!"

_Not for long!_ That's probably what the _Gracious se__ñora_ bowman said as he drew his bow and shot the observer right out of the tower.

"This is going to be _very_ rough, everyone!" Pazuu warns, "Hang on!"

As Pazuu pulls around the tower, setting up the ship to crab towards the courtyard, the craft starts to shudder.

"The stall!" Lucy warns.

"Shimatta," Pazuu grumbles, pushing the pedals forward a bit, "Good thing I asked the program for that twist."

"Pull up!" she screams, bracing for the impact.

"We're already pulled up as much as we can!" he says.

The ship hits the ground hard, stopping in half its own length.

"Good thing I built this thing like a brick outhouse," Oyagata grumbles as he unbelts from his seat, "Pazuu, please don't _ever _land like that again, the bruise on my butt's probably going to be the size of a stew pot's lid."

Pazuu and Lucy can't help but smile at each other, but as Lucy limps from the plane, it is quite obvious that she didn't fare the landing much better. Pazuu was inspecting something on the floor, and suddenly rises with a look combining concern and disgust, reaching for the overhead compartment, containing some fast setting glue and dowels.

"What's wrong?" Lucy asks, putting her weight on her better leg as she looks back at the aircraft.

"Busted a tail pedal," Pazuu says, "After I get that started, I'll need to inspect the rest of the craft." Noticing her posture, he asks, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," she says, "Just a sprain." She starts limping off towards the armory, but does seem to be loosening up as she goes.

"Thanks for spiking that ballista," General Tali says unhappily, "He's been giving us trouble all afternoon. We stormed the castle's granary and mill." He sighs, "I could hear the fit when my men got inside."

"Empty?" she asks.

"No, _full,_" he groans, looking right at her, "Their harvest was almost twice as good as ours, unless they're putting older grain in newer bags. They obviously _could_ have been feeding these kids something."

Satomi tiptoes around a bunch of hanging horse's sides on her way to the kitchen, following a soldier Tali sent to lead them.

"Thank you," Christa says once they're inside, "What would you like us to cook?"

The man shrugs, obviously he doesn't know Mandarin. Christa and Satomi are rather alarmed at the unprepared state of the kitchen, immediately they start preparing ingredients. They don't understand each other anymore, but they do know food. As they notice the five men standing around, they direct them by example to start preparing ingredients. Two of them look at each other rather oddly, shrug and start working, one peeling potatoes, the other squeezing oranges. The ladies obviously didn't realize that one of the five men was a Vendoan prisoner who had surrendered only minutes earlier, the surviving ballista crewman, whose partner could still be heard crawling down from the roof where he landed.

"Satomi," Lucy says, "Did you want to return to Jenwa or spend the night here? I'd recommend returning since there is no guarantee Tali can hold out."

Satomi gently shakes her head, "Consider me Vendoan until we're out of here."

"No way!" Lucy says.

"Why not?" Satomi asks, "I want to be considered with the same priority as all my friends."

"That, I _can_ do," she smiles, "See you tomorrow if all goes well." She's gone before Satomi can respond.

Satomi tries to figure it out as she goes to light the stove, which is relatively primitive compared to the Laputan ones she has experience with.

"Madame," one of the soldiers says, gently pulling her away from the firebox. He loads it up with fuel while Satomi starts cutting the ribs. Twenty minutes later, the stove is running fine. Apparently, the man is telling her not to touch the firebox, but she doesn't understand a word to know for sure. He instructs her to stand back, and shields his face as he pulls on the damper handle. The resulting flare-up has her quite convinced. He taps on the thermometer gauge, and then himself. She concludes that he's telling her to come get him if she needs to adjust the oven's temperature.

"Sir, this is okay, right?" she reaches for the oven handle above. He nods. She gets a stool and a tiny piece of meat, opens the oven and puts it on the middle shelf. He seems confused. She explains, "I can't read the gauge anymore. This is only to test the temperature." After fifteen minutes, she takes it out, and concludes that the oven is too warm.

After this, General Tali comes in with a shedule, set according to the moonshine's position on the floor, someone need only open the window for a couple of seconds to check the time. A thousand people are going to be eating in shifts of two hundred, one meal per hour. Satomi and Christie seem quite overwhelmed, but Tali gives them a special assurance: an entire company of his soldiers have been preparing ingredients in the dining hall!

Satomi is a bit nervous going back to the Vendoan line-up mode rather than the meal carts she used on the flying castle, but Christa is right beside her as the kids start eagerly lining up. Christa had set up the nearest table for the dozen or so children who were so injured or sick that they couldn't walk.

One had lost both arms and couldn't feed himself. He had been left to die in the stone box. It took a lot of prodding by Christa to get him to eat his first spoonful. After discovering how good the food actually is, his eyes suddenly glisten with hope, and he squeaks, "Obasan, arigatoo."

Christa suddenly turns to the serving line and says, "Satomi!" then patting the boy softly on the head, she says, "Hobasharigato!"

Moments later, they have traded places. The boy is wearing a plain blue shirt, and plenty of bandages. He's freshly bathed, and seems to be embarrassed by it.

"You wear a Kutsui pyjama shirt," the boy says, "but you're in perfect shape. Weird. I bet you can't hear a word I'm saying. No one understands me any more. If you could, you'd wipe that stupid smile from your face."

The boy seems moderately disgusted as Satomi actually starts laughing, "Christa called me over because she recognized that we have the same language. She called it _Arigatoo,_ but it is really called Nihongo. God has messed up everyone's language."

After another mouthful, he says, "You _can't_ really be from Kutsui, I'm sorry. Your shirt must be a coincidence. How a well-fed _Laputan_ kid gets into a shelter shirt is beyond me."

"I've only been a well-fed Laputan kid for the two weeks," she says, "since I ran from Kutsui."

"Hands don't grow back," he sobs, "Why not just let me die? I'm useless."

"I'm sure they'll figure out something," Satomi says, "During a visit to Jenwa last year ... _totally_ illegal of course ... I saw a man in a chair with wheels. He was missing one leg and one foot, made his living by spinning and weaving beautiful tapestries."

"And the Laputans still have their language?" he asks, "They all understand each other."

"No," she says, "They're just as messed up as we are. They're figuring out ways to communicate, I'll show you later. Eat up," she orders, "We built a big bird to get you out of here, and I put a lot of work into this food."

He smiles for the first time since the armory explosion blew off his arms at the elbows, possibly the first time in many months, or maybe even his entire life.

"Where are you from?" she asks.

"The royal harlem," he sighs, "I'm an illegitimate prince: someone no one wants to know exists. A child no one was supposed to have. Our shelter is most secret, and has no name. We call it Shigoku."

"Shigoku," she repeats, then realizes that it isn't a name, but a word, a concept of a place: _Hell._ "I guess then ... Kutsui wasn't the worst shelter, after all."

"Beats the armory," he grunts, before taking another bite.

[From the movie: 1:10 Dola instructs Sheeta, who has it relatively easy feeding _Tiger Moth's_ crew of twelve (including herself and Pazuu): "You serve five meals a day; go easy on the water." The kitchen looked like it had a week's worth of dishes accumulate and _then_ got hit by a tornado. She has it shined up in just 28 seconds of reel time!]


	18. Chapter 18

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 18

Satomi wakes up. She felt the ground quake. The kids sleep clustered on the workshop floor and set in rolls on the table, restrained from rolling off by makeshift rails.

"Satomi?" the boy asks, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, Okurai," she says, "The bird's back on its first flight of the morning."

"Okurai?" he asks.

"You're nobility," she says, "the son of a king. Okurai means _noble,_" she says, "And you better get used to it, because no Laputan's ever going to call you _Chikosou._" [You may look it up.]

"It'll take some getting used to," he says.

Lucy pops her head into the huge room. "What is _with_ this thing," she whispers. She finds her, "Satomi?" she asks, "are you okay?"

"I'm fine, why?" she asks.

"It's looking for someone," she whispers, "Could it be-" she puts her arm on Okurai's shoulder.

His eyes open suddenly, startling her.

"He's alive!" she gasps, "but his arms."

"Eight days in a stone box," Satomi weeps, "His shelter had no name. Neither did he. The children were born to the king's whores, unwanted and nameless. They called their shelter, _Hell._ And their staff called all of them, _chikosou._"

"Why would someone so pretty and clean seek out one like me?" the boy asks.

"I named him _Okurai,_" Satomi smiles, "because he's nobility."

"Oh," Lucy says, "Okurai, welcome to Laputa. Please, come with me."

"Who is that?" Okurai asks as Satomi helps him up. He grimaces and sweats with pain at his barely treated injuries.

"Ask her," Satomi says.

"Pazuu needs help with the bird's wings again, Satomi," Lucy says, "Better go see him."

"Yes ma'am," she says, then hurries off.

"What's your name?" the boy asks, once Lucy has him in an empty storage closet.

"Lucy," she says.

"Why are you dressed so nicely?"

"I'm the queen of Laputa," she says softly, "Sit here, please. I want to see if this'll work." She pulls the glowing stone from her collar, "I think this wants to heal you."

"_Heal_ me?" he gasps.

"Oh ... no," she weeps, "God? I can hear You?"

"God?" the boy wonders.

"God wants to heal you using this stone, actually," Lucy weeps, "I can hear Him. Please tell me the words." Softly, she says, "Ratobarita kitte shinoto koronai"

"Itai!" he gasps, then looks at his arms, "Actually ... it's a tingle."

A breeze is blowing through the room, and Lucy's crystal glows excitedly.

"What?" he trembles, "Take these off!" he flaps his arms, "Take them off _now!_"

She does, then watches as the glowing tips of his arms extend, rebuilding the flesh destroyed by the explosion, widening into palms, and then splitting along four fingers and a thumb per hand. The glow dims, both from the crystal and the spell. He tries them out; they work fine, and are cleaner and softer than he has ever known. He then notices that Lucy seems rather stunned, but she's looking at his body.

"Okurai!" she gasps, "You're dressed like the king!"

Sure enough, he stands, finding himself dressed as the Vendoan king, a long, violet jacket over a blue shirt and broad red tie, but lacking the almost armor-like coating of medals that the Vendoan king is usually seen with. He pulls the bandage from the side of his head, and finds no wound underneath.

"You're the last surviving heir to the Vendoan throne," she realizes. She embraces him, "Rule well, Your Majesty."

"I surrender Vendoa to you," he weeps, "You're a lot better at this multilingual thing, obviously."

"Okay," she says, "We'll work out the details later. Let's see if your people will accept you."

He steps out of the closet.

"AAAHH!" she screams, rearing up with an iron pry bar.

He shields his head with his arms.

"Uh," she croaks, "Okurai?" The pry bar lands with a surpised thud at Satomi's feet. "I'm so sorry, I didn't recognize you." She grabs him with a strong embrace, "I'm sorry. I'm so glad Lucy's made you king."

Her eyes pop open with surprise as he returns the embrace, "Oh that's nothing."

"Your arms?" she squeaks.

"Right here," he says. Turning to Lucy, he says, "I want to hear your God as well."

"Then listen," Lucy smiles, "If He wants to speak, He most certainly will. And it was not _I,_ who made you king, Okurai. I was just listening to Him."

The children stare as he makes his way through the workshop. He blushes. One by one, they stand, then one bows, and another. After the first few, the rest bow as one.

"Uh," he says, "Ohayoo gozaimasu?" [Good morning]

They all jump up and start cheering. As that goes on, Tali slips in and hands Lucy a page from his notepad. Lucy's smile is gone in a flash. She retreats outside, where he can hear General Tali over the racket.

"Yes," he confirms, "Those spearmen are on the move, right for us. Our scouts estimate that they'll be here within the hour. Pazuu is recommending a bombing raid with the aircraft. We'll have her loaded in about five minutes."

Lucy bites her lip, then says, "General, I might have a better option."

[From the movie: Nothing for this chapter.]


	19. Chapter 19

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 19

"Better hurry, Your Majesty," he says gravely, "We still have five hundred kids and three hundred adults to evacuate. We need to hold out for one more day at least."

"I will," she says, then rushes back into the workshop.

"Sir," an officer grabs his sleeve, "You _have_ to see this. This guy's arms disappeared like five minutes ago while we were interrogating him. He wouldn't even give us his name."

Finding him, near death, and scrawny, notices that his hair color really is the same warm shade of brown as the boy he found in the stone box the day before. The general grabs him by the scruff and asks him, "I am General Tali, Laputan Special Army: a force put together to rescue your nation's children. What is your name?"

Coughing, still stunned at the sudden state of his arms, even though the miraculous transformation let him out of his bindings, he finally groans, "Kaideno," and quits breathing.

Tali lets him down to the floor easy. Others try to resuscitate him. Tali instead notices a small object under the prisoner's chair. He pushes the chair out of the way and picks it up. A signet ring, he recognizes the seal. He barely holds onto it. "Where's Lucy?" he gasps. He rushes back to the workshop.

"Your Majesty!" he cries as he crashes through the door, "I think we can forge a-"

"_Forge?_" Lucy interrupts as though it were a rude proposal, "Forge _what?_" She bursts into a beaming smile and says, "General, your timing is impeccable. Meet Okurai Palo Uru Vendoa."

"Okurai?" it's several seconds before he recognizes the boy, "Congratulations, Your Majesty. Oh," he says about the ring he's holding as though he's noticing it in his hand for the first time, "I believe this belongs to you," he presents the ring with both hands.

"Oh?" Okurai asks timidly, "What is it?"

"Your signet ring," she says, "So now you can sign these, _King of Vendoa._ That way, instead of those awful bombs, we can drop these on the approaching spearmen who want to kill us. _Your_ spearmen, Your Majesty."

Hastily, he starts inking the seal onto the documents. A collection of hastily drafted stenographers scrawled the same message in nine different languages and made several copies of each. The scratchy script and the quality of the paper contrasts remarkably with the queen's graceful signature and crisp Laputan emblem. Okurai is stunned at how pretty he can write his own name.

Lucy and Okurai take turns sealing each scroll with wax, so that each has two seals: that of Laputa and Vendoa.

"It'll have to do, Ma'am," Tali says, grabbing the fifty or so completed ones, "We're out of time."

The two rulers leave the half-finished scrolls and follow Tali onto the plane. "Okurai, you're with me," the general says as he heads for the tail, jumping through the opening in the rear ramp. He ties the still somewhat bewildered nine year old king into a seat, then calls towards the front of the bird, "Go! Go! Go!"

As the aircraft pitches back, General Tali lets go of the scrolls to hang on, where all tumble against the back wall and its plug door, except for one that escaped a window. Okurai squeaks, then looks over his other shoulder, seeing the angry mob of spearmen lifting their shields.

On the ground, the terrified spearmen hold their shields over their heads, waiting for whatever the dragon might drop on them. The little scrolls flutter down, few and far between. One threads itself on the tip of a spear and slides down the shaft to the holder's hand. The man looks at it in shocked wonder. It has the royal seals of both Laputa and Vendoa. Impossible, when his men can barely understand each other, and took over a week to agree to march back to the castle to seek orders. He opens it, recognizing the seals inside, but he can't read it.

"Okurai?" the guy next to him says, "Gimme that." He takes from the man's hand the scroll he can't understand, and thrusts into his rankmate one that he can:

_The Nation of Vendoa has surrendered to the Kingdom of Laputa. Lay your spears on the ground and stand on them. You may keep your shields. Approach the gate single file with your knives in their sheaths, carrying no bomb or spark. Signed Lucita Toelle Uru Laputa; Okurai Palo Uru Laputa_

The man throws his spear down.

"Are you mad?" the guy next to him gasps, "It's _fake!_ Not even a good forgery: the king's name is _Kaideno,_ you idiot!"

"Who cares!" the guy says, "If we don't do what he says, that dragon's next pass will drop _dynamite_ on us!"

"Pick up your spear, coward," the other says, drawing his knife, "Or in the name of the _real_ king," he huffs, "I'll run you through myself!"

Suddenly a body lands on him, sending the knife skittering across the stone of Tekiton's streets. The body is wrapped in the flags of both nations.

"Phew," Lucy says, "he didn't get impaled."

"It feels bad to treat Daddy's body like that," Okurai sighs, "even though I never got a hug or a word, or even so much as a glance from him while he was alive." He pauses to wipe a tear from his eye.

Starting from ground zero outward, the soldiers, except for the one the body landed on, back away and lower their spears. In the quiet above, the bird's crew can hear the iron clink of the spears landing on each other, and can see that they have pulled the Vendoan flag back from the body's face and recognized it.

"This is impossible," the man gasps as he crawls out from under his king's body, "Kaideno had no heir. The Prime Minister was going to take over!"

"One of the _chikosou,_" another gasps, "It's the only way." [He might not be speaking Japanese.]

An officer arrives at the scene, "Your Majesty?" he gasps.

"It has to be fake," the guy says.

The officer gives his standard to another who is standing at the edge of the small clearing, then, to everyone's surprise, dares to touch the body of the king. "Flesh and bone," he reports.

"Sir," somebody gasps, "The courier's back, on foot and behind us."

"Sir," the courier, a young lady reports, "I was taken prisoner, apologies for my tardiness. They sent me last night with this drawing," She shows him a picture of the dragon, "I couldn't find you at the barracks, and I was dodging gangs all the way here," she explains. "This is the blood of one of their members," she explains the stains on her dress, "It's safer with the Laputans, believe it or not. I was well fed, they mended my dress while giving me a man's uniform and a private room to change. I slept with the children, five hundred are left." She sees the injuries on the king's body, "My _God!_" she gasps, chewing on her knuckle.

"What?" the officer asks, "And what happened to your pony?"

"They killed it, and fed it to the children, some to my-" she stops suddenly, as though nearly saying something that could get her killed.

"Your what?" the officer asks.

"The children in the workshop," she squeaks.

"Anything else?" he prompts.

"The last of the..." she quivers, barely able to bring herself to say it, "...chikosou. They found him in the stone box last night. His arms were blown off, and they were-"

The officer raises an eyebrow to indicate that he still wants to hear everything she has to say, whether she wants to utter it or not.

"...feeding him by hand," she finally finishes.

The officer spits, "Feeding an armless _chikosou_ by hand. Misty Laputans."

"His injuries," she weeps, pointing at the king's body, "were _exactly_ like this," she quivers.

"Is this his handwriting?" the officer asks, showing her the brief surrender treaty while hiding its royal seals and signatures.

"He had no hands," the courier says, "It _can't_ be."

"Kaideno-sama was _not_ in the armory explosion," the officer says, "I have dispatches from him, in his handwriting, referring to it. He obviously still had hands after it happened. Not like he'd ever get anywhere _near_ a chikosou! What else do you know about this boy?"

"A nine-year old girl in his language replaced the adult who cleaned him up after the soldiers dug him out of the stone box. She wore part of a Kutsui uniform, and called him-"

"What?" the officer prompts.

"Okurai," she quivers.

The officer stands, bellowing, lacing his speech with the worst of expletives, but other than that, saying, "Where is he!" Then he grabs her by the shoulders, "Tell me _now!_"

She's splattered with even more blood as the head of an arrow spurts out of his chest towards her. She looks up to see the Laputan dragon flying low over them and suddenly climbing with a glow from the front windows. A boy holding a bow screams out the window at them, in a language she doesn't understand.

"Good shot, Your Majesty," General Tali gently tugs the bow in Okurai's death grip

Someone who apparently understood what he said asks the courier, as the dying officer collapses in front of her. "_Okaasan?_"

Another, obviously unaware of how the officer fell, charges at her, but stops before he impact's the speaker's spear tip, "Naniyosuru! Sorejou orunjyunee!"

"It wasn't me!" she cries, "Someone from the dragon," pointing.

The boy cries the same thing as he did before, pumping his fist out the dragon's window.

General Tali hands someone a piece of paper, and this brawny man nudges Okurai out of the way and bellows through a passive megaphone, "That lady is the Queen Mother! No one touches her!"

"Queen Mother?" she gasps.

Others start bellowing through similar megaphones, in different languages. People around her start gasping, "Madre? Mother?"

"Mama! Niigete!" the boy cries.

She finally recognizes him.

"Mama, retreat!" the man next to the new king yells through his megaphone, "Make way! Anyone who touches her dies!"

She runs back towards the Vendoan castle, the spearmen parting way and throwing their spears down. The men in the aircraft only relax their bowstrings once she is well clear of the increasingly disordered formation. She gets to the courier door in the gate, "Let me in, ple-"

The door hits her as it opens and the gatekeepers pull her in, handling her quite roughly, but avoiding the most controversial places as they send her from hand to hand through the gate's long, zigzagging man-lock.

She finds herself standing in front of a familiar face, "Christa?" she gasps.

"Karen?" Christa asks, "I take it they don't like you any more?"

"That boy with the missing arms," Karen asks hastily as Christa examines the mark on her cheek from the door, "Where is he?"

"Oh?" Christa says, "I lost track of him. Apparently our queen found a prince dressed in royal clothes hiding in a closet. Secretly, the king was one of our prisoners. His signet ring fell out of his sleeve when his arms disappeared. He died in minutes. General Tali presented it to this boy, and he agreed to surrender Vendoa." he shows her a scroll, "here's a copy in our language."

"I have to find this boy," Karen says frantically, "He's my son, someone named him Okurai, I saw him with-" she gasps once she has the treaty open.

"Any idea who the father is?" Christa asks calmly.

The woman is terrified, trembling, and though it were possible, melting, "Please," she squeaks, "first tell me where he is. I want to see him one last time."

Christa sighs, "I have no idea where he is, probably evacuated to Jenwa in this morning's trip. I remember, though, he does look a lot like Oku-"

Watching it dawn on Christa, Helen knows she's on death row, knowing full well that she is about to get busted for what is, in Laputa, a capital crime she committed ten years before.

[From the movie: "Not one step closer," the boss at 19min; no furigana, so I hope I romanized it correctly.]


	20. Chapter 20

Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa

Chapter 20

"If I'm right about what's going on," Christa says, "You're the Queen Mother. Please tell me."

She nods, "Yes, the king is his father."

"And you're certain?" Christa asks, "He's nine; if you're old enough to be his mother, you haven't aged anywhere near as quickly as the members of his harlem usually do."

"Absolutely," she says, "I only shared my bed that one time." She's on the verge of tears, "For an hour, I felt like the most beautiful woman in the whole world. After that, he said I sucked, and that he hated me," she starts bawling, "and to get out and never come back."

"That's awful!" Christa gasps, holding her steady.

"It wasn't just a job to me, like with the others," she weeps, "I really wanted to make him happy. I loved him. After, I never wanted to go through that again. Nine months later, I had a boy. They let me keep him for only six months before taking him away to Hell. Actually, the shelter doesn't really have a name, that's what the kids call it. I tried to see him as much as I could."

"You have the heart of a Laputan," Christa says, "Your son might have been the only," she huffs and rolls her eyes to show that she is unhappy with the term, "chikosou whose father could be identified with certainty. It was quite rare for me to find one, but every now and then they'd get transferred to Kutsui."

"Oh!" Helen says, "I did get an offer or two like that from the administrators."

"In exchange for what?" Christa asks, then decides, "Oh, never mind."

There's a bit of a ruckus behind them, just outside the gatehouse, Okurai bursts into the room, "Mama!" she jumps on Helen, "Are you alright?"

She gently pushes him, "Careful, you'll get your suit all messed up," she says.

He looks up at her, then laughs and jumps on her again, "I'm so happy!"

"Finally," she says, "It'll _really_ be alright."

After a few minutes of that, Helen looks at Lucy and asks, "Please, don't kill me. I want to be a mother to my son."

Lucy obviously doesn't understand, and only then realizes that mother and son haven't been understanding each other's words.

"Mama, what's wrong?" Okurai asks.

Christa furiously flips through her little code book to translate what she said, then hands the little paper to Lucy.

Lucy gasps, "Oh!"

"What's wrong?" Okurai asks.

"Your mother thinks we're going to execute her for adultery," Lucy says, then shakes her head, "I can see already that she has a Laputan heart." She turns to General Tali and asks, "If you were to guess how old she is, based on her place in the harem, how old would you guess?"

General Tali looks at Lucy with concern and then discerns Lucy's purpose for asking. A glance at Helen, and he says, "Twenty to twenty-three."

"Mom?" Okurai asks, "What is she getting at?"

Helen shrugs; without Nihongo, she has no idea what she's talking about.

"Of course, Your Majesty," General Tali continues, "We've already discussed this. Her record says she's almost twenty-eight, and I was surprised at how young she looked."

"I had guessed that she was the king's favorite," Lucy says, "and that she was living as his wife, with beauty treatments and emotional security, but that doesn't jibe with Okurai's treatment, now does it?" Turning to Okurai, she says, "I'm guessing that you were conceived one night, just one night, and that your mother never touched anyone else since."

General Tali takes the pages from Christa and smiles, "You're _good!_" then shows her what Christa has written.

Okurai jumps on his mother again in a tight embrace.

Three days later, the plane lands in Jenwa with the last load out of Tekiton.

"It's working out rather well," Okurai says, "I'm glad you're in charge now, Lucy."

"Oh," Lucy smiles, "Why thank you!" She goes back to the dragon, which has seen better days by this point.

"Where do you think _you're_ going?" Pazuu asks, rushing to her side.

"I have some unfinished business on Laputa," she says.

"Then I'm coming with you!" he insists.

Lucy thinks this is a bad idea, obviously, but the look on Pazuu's face brooks no negotiation. He's coming. Period. So she sighs, "Okay."

"The castle's turned north, Your Majesty, it might be over Gondoa by now," General Tali reports.

Holding her crystal, she says, "I'll have _no_ trouble finding it, General," she smiles, "But thanks anyway."

As promised, they arrive at the castle, with some help from the light spell of the crystal, since it was beyond visible range. After landing, the two build the memorial for the garden, describing the _War of Laputa._

"I need to utter one last spell. It won't take out the tree," Lucy says, "but it will destroy _everything_ else. We can't afford to have this thing around any more, not with humanity as it is. You saw what it did to Jenwa. Take the bird out of here. I'll use one of your gliders if I survive."

After a twenty minute hug, she helps push it off, and watches him go. After this, she goes into the core, the lower garden, where she watches the crystal float. She's pretty sure she isn't going to survive this after all.

_Oote nabiru toeru ittenaye urusu-_

"There is hope for mankind," General Tali had said, "_please_ reconsider!"

She can't say the last word, the Laputan for "dust". She winces, then runs from the still intact lower garden, bawling. In the upper core, she decides to set up a weather system to make the flying castle almost impossible to recognize and even harder to reach, the counterclockwise flow of a low pressure system, then in its eye, immediately surrounding the castle itself, a vicious clockwise flow. She gives it some time before activating the system, so she can escape.

Returning to the castle above, she discovers that some of the structure is unstable in the rudest way: the floor below her gives, and she finds herself falling towards Gondoa from thousands of feet up.

After her initial scream of surprise, she calms, still falling, "God, I guess I wasn't meant to survive after all."

That's when her crystal gets protective, bursting in a blossom of light and slowing her fall. "I'm floating?" she gasps. She looks up to see the terrible weather system she designed forming to protect her castle. "I hope I made the right decision," she weeps.

She settles to the ground, surprised to feel herself landing in someone's arms. "Hi, Lucy," says Pazuu as the crystal dims, "I guess you didn't need the glider after all." Looking up at the forming storm, he says, "Since the dragon came from there, I think I'll call it a dragon's lair- Uwah!"

Suddenly her full weight applies itself to his arms, and the teenager is unable to stand. They wipe out in a heap.

"Oh, sorry!" Pazuu says as he picks himself up, having wiped out on her in an awkward way.

"Oh, that's okay," Lucy says, "Say, can you hold onto this for a while?" she offers him the crystal, "It's tradition that the man will give it to his lady. And I don't care that you were ever Vendoan."

"Give it back to you?" Pazuu says, "Uh, when?"

She whispers in his ear. He seems a little shocked, "Uh really?"

She's a bit coy, since what she whispered was pretty serious stuff.

"But you're older," he says nervously.

"Six years!" she shrugs, "So what? I'm a widow, and I don't have any children, so it's perfectly legal."

"Okay," he says, "Lucy, er..." he's breaking out into a cold sweat, "Uh ... will you marry me?"

[From the movie: Pazuu's near wipeout is at 7min, but Lucy is heavier than Sheeta, being quite a bit older. The dragon's lair weather system is first mentioned in 1:22, and, to the best of my knowledge, is impossible in real life. The one surrounding Laputa may be the only one to exist in this world, but I'm not sure. We catch our first glimpse of the memorial (which is quite big) at 1:31, about which Pazuu says, "I wish I could read the writing." As I close this story, I'm grateful that I can, and wish I could leave a flower.]


	21. Epilogue

War of Laputa

Epilogue

Recommended closing theme: .com/watch?v=sfRecbWWINs

[Studio Ghibli 1986 1:53:57; Terry has enhanced the translation where appropriate.]

"You have three minutes!" Muska says, raising his pistol.

Pazuu watches carefully as he backs away, and then walks over to Sheeta, reluctant to let his guard down.

Pazuu!" Sheeta cries as he approaches to within a few inches.

Muska is cautious as well, waiting until Pazuu and Sheeta are hugging each other before reloading his revolver.

"Sheeta, calm down and listen," Pazuu says quietly, "Repeat the words of that spell." He looks into her eyes to let her know that he's serious, "I'll say them with you. Put your hand in mine."

He has Laputa's control crystal after all; he was lying when he told Muska he had hidden it away earlier.

"I cut the lady's ropes," he says, referring to Dola, the matriarch of the pirates who helped them get to the castle.

Sheeta leans softly over his shoulder.

[Terry Wilson 2010 1:54:50]

"The last queen of Laputa almost uttered it herself," Sheeta explains, "But she couldn't bring herself to do it."

"Are you saying-?"

"We only need the last word," she says.

"Good," Pazuu says, "I don't have another shot for this thing."

"This is the complete spell," Sheeta explains, "It means _The royal courts shall return to the dust._"

_Oote nabiru toeru ittenaye urusu ... barasu_

[Studio Ghibli 1986 1:54:50]

"Time's up!" Muska impatiently barks, "What do you say?"

They turn to him, Sheeta's right hand in Pazuu's left. He tosses the empty grenade launcher on the floor at his feet. Together, after 708 years, they complete Lucy's incantation:

_Barasu!_

[In the movie, Muska's "three minutes" was only 53 seconds long, implying that over two minutes of their conversation was clipped, and left up to fans like me to speculate on. I also went to great lengths to confirm that Pazuu's gun was empty. I wasn't sure if it had a round in the chamber, and Dola gave him two at 1:40:29. He fires his first at 1:50:30, but we see him loading the gun before he fires it, showing that the gun was empty. He fires his second round at 1:51:51. At 3min, in the prologue of the movie, it appears that a pirate is able to fire his gun twice without reloading, but going through it frame-by-frame, I have concluded that it is actually two different pirates. It occurs at 2:46-7 on my disk, when the pirates take the corridor leading to Sheeta's cabin. In other news, that Romu has a descendent in the movie implies something about his marital faithfulness, or that he somehow survived his plunge from the castle.]


	22. Movie Outtakes unofficial

Laputa: The Castle In The Sky

Outtakes:

Synchronization point: 0:01:45; Dola's first tear gas round hits the passenger airship's window before boarding.

0:07:40: Pazuu saves the day, saving Sheeta from a long, slow plunge into the bottom of the mine, but the moment the boss wonders where he is, the plank snaps and the meatballs just ordered from everyone's favorite diner in Jenwa goes down with it.

0:14:20 (approx.): It took us a while to train the doves not to borrow the crystal.

0:19:16: Madge beats up a pirate for trying to hurt her new friend Sheeta. "Take that ... and that ... and ... _that!_"

0:20:24: "Honey, that was the costume department's last shirt."

0:28:24: Pazuu: "Oh, drat ... that was my last match."

0:31:06: "Tenshida, Tenshi ga o..." ("Angels ... Little angels...")

0:37:10: Sheeta: "My name is... Uh... Er... I'll have to go look it up."

0:40:20: Muska: "Mind if I try this on?"

0:46:09: Madge: "...and _that!_"

0:47:47: Dola: "...and you don't even have any salt!"

0:51:00: Muska (on _Goliath_): "What a piece of junk!" (i.e.: Luke Skywalker's first reaction to _Millenium Falcon;_ same voice actor in English)

0:53:00: Sheeta: "I asked for _light,_ not _wind_, you silly little thing!"

0:54:00: Robot: "Alright, now _this_ is gonna cost _you_ an arm and a leg!"

0:58:35: Robot: "NOBODY touches my queen's ponytails!"

1:09:50: Muska: "Mind if I try this on?"

1:10:50: _Tiger Moth's_ rudder falls off while Pazuu's oiling it.

1:16:00: Pazuu's doves show up demanding breakfast.

1:24:45: Pazuu's father: "Son, I can't believe you're trying to come here in _that_ piece of junk!"

1:29:03: Robot: "Kids, next time, crash your kite somewhere else."

1:32:12: Robot: "Well, that sucks, 'cus I can't read it either."

1:33:32: Robot: "Hey, that tickles!"

1:38:57: Pazuu: "I should've taken those seconds, I'm hungry" (i.e.: stomach growling alerts Muska's bodyguard.)

1:40:15: Pops: "Pazuu, I don't want to hear any complaints about the view." (hint: Pops is Dola's husband.)

1:51:45: Pazuu: "Ulp ... Hayao-san, I um ... swallowed the crystal."

1::55:03: Pazuu: "Uh, Sheeta? ... What was that word again?"

1:55:45: Miyazaki-san: "CUT! Alright, who left that rake on the floor?"

1:58:50: Pazuu: "I lost my bottomless bag with the fried eggs, and you lost your magic crystal ... Oh, well, at least the kite still works."

2:00:40: Pops: "Sheeta, I don't want to hear any complaints about the view."


End file.
